Mt 25:14-30 The master and servants of this parable engage in a relation where relationship is a matter of talents and the relationship preferred is of abundance. "Master, knowing you reap where you did not sow" says the lowliest servant, "here is the talent you gave me."
The problem with talent today is that gap, the economic gap between rich and poor. Talent today remains a matter of money just as it did when Jesus told the parable. The measure of a relationship continues to measure in terms of economic viability. Jesus and his parable address the standard of money and profit, gain and loss, responsibility in the eyes of God.
Today my friends and I gather in New York City for a wedding. Theirs is a relationship of love rather than a business relationship. We read the story today in the context of the ceremony and in the vision of the Catholic Worker which brought Amy and Ted together.
According to the aims and means of the Catholic Worker, interpreted, discussed, laicized, boiled down, love and only love is the answer. Community corrects pride, heals hurts, restores divisions, invents alternatives, breeds relationships and fosters love. Thus one pretty day our friends shared their time and talent. It was a day of retreat, a time of preparation. They met in the labor of protest, that organizing aspect of love where intention is purified and hearts and minds find harmony, when the genius of love takes ferment. They met to plan out a witness against torture.
Today we remember what brought Amy and Ted together. It was the talent God gave them, deep desires to implement justice, skills to craft message and contemplate true community. God held designs for love and our ceremony attests to the fact that Amy and Ted have understood. Like good and faithful servants that double down, so has their commitment rooted in the vision of the Catholic Worker.
It was not a simple emotion when we said goodbye to Amy from the White Rose Catholic Worker. We knew she would join Mary House in NYC. We knew she had envisioned the step for some time and we knew of the blooming love with a worker there, and Teddy had visited us and won our hearts. It was our craft retreat that he had joined; he brought with him materials to assemble, a kind of history of Mary House, clippings from the Worker newspaper from years and decades past--a collection of "What's going on in the house". Amy, as Ted well understood, is first and foremost an observer. Her talent of observation is uncanny, you may not detect it if you don't know her, but her knack for being the devil's advocate…can make her invisible. Ted knew how to let her have an edge, the lens of history. This is the hospitality of heart we sensed in him.
Customs, exchanges, these mean less to Catholic Workers than professions of love, declarations of peace, harmony, simple acts of kindness, bread for the hungry, blood on a bomb. The ceremony of Ted and Amy reminds us of the preferential simplicity, of the servant who said, "here is the talent". Their love for the poor has brought them together in acts of hospitality for such as these. Every day they can say, we have welcomed the stranger servant, the shy, the fearful, the homeless. I think a life like theirs will forever model a gift of abundance.
Amen.
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