Muteness and the Redemption of Brotherly Love

In today’s reading from Genesis, Joseph’s brothers choose to live their lives without him, to the point of selling Joseph---Jacob’s beloved son---into slavery so as never to see him or hear his voice again.  In the Gospel, Jesus tells the parable of the Vineyard Owner and Wicked Tenants.  Christ shares it both to reveal his identity as the divine, only-begotten Son of the Father (He is no mere prophet, like the servants in the parable), and to point to the temporary suffering and silencing of this revelation which will occur in His Passion and Death---as prelude to His Resurrection.  What escalates the tension in this story is precisely the intolerable desire of the wicked tenants to render the vineyard owner’s rightful claims mute:  Each bearer of the master’s voice is silenced by abuse and, ultimately, murder. 

I believe that my current temporary “muteness” also has, so to speak, its own parabolic significance.  The story begins many years before my recent jaw surgery.  Being the eldest, beloved son in my family, each new sibling had to find his or her distinctive voice in our home.  My parents loved each of us unconditionally, but I had the chronological benefit of a head start on the others!  When they came along (especially the next born, my sister), of course I felt the predictable envy and jealousy---and with intensity.  As a small child I remember ripping my sister’s birth photo out of her baby album (what a version of the damnatio memoriae!), because I “wanted her gone.”  If there had been Ishmaelites passing by---as happened to Joseph’s brothers---I would unhesitatingly have sold her.  As it was, my parents had to put a lock on the upper outside of my bedroom door, lest I escape to do her worse harm by night.  The thought that my parents’ love for me was somehow divided and diminished in being shared with D’Lee, Damon, and Dominic was a damnable error on my part. 

When Dominic---the youngest of us four kids---arrived, our home was already crowded with conversations which had preceded him by years.  As one might imagine, he didn’t talk much (how could he?).  Not that we noticed---until we did.  With all of the intimate and calculated cruelty which only siblings can inflict, we began to refer to him as “the Mute.”  The slur became a regular form of address.  Years pass, children grow up, siblings relate to each other as adults, and wounds heal.  But I have asked myself in these past few months what scars remain.

For the first time in my life, I have been placed where my youngest brother was. My plastic splint mutes my voice for much of the day, reduces many of my basic daily activities to those of a child (can’t chew yet---only soft foods!), and leaves me at times helplessly frustrated.  I am as silent at Mass as the chair I sit on, ordered by my circumstances into merely listening to others speak.  I now wonder if, when he was growing up, by brother Dominic ever felt like just a piece of furniture in our house.

The point of this autobiographical archeology is to express a great unexpected gift I have received in my jaw’s injury and recovery:  I have been given the grace of entering a dimension of my brother’s experience that I never before knew from within.  At Christmas, before my surgery, I wrote Dominic a letter about some of what I knew I was going to face and how in God’s lovingly wise and humorous---and, as I also emphasized to Dom, infinitely just---plan, I was to become the “mute” of the family.  His reaction was amusement combined with amazement; I had simultaneously hit a funny bone and struck a nerve.  In sharing a pain that went so deep in such an unpredictably laughable way, I believe that we shared in that moment the grace of Christ’s redemption of brotherly love.  Only the Lord knows how our respective voices will be further restored in future exchanges, spoken and unspoken.  The Apostles knew that speaking of the Cross only makes sense in the light of the Resurrection and with the new tongues and new horizons of Pentecost.  Continually returning to past pain for its own sake leads, at best, only to an empty tomb:  Christ is not there---He is risen . . . .

But for now during Lent, we can turn with confident repentance to Christ our Brother, because in Him we discover our identity as beloved adoptive sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father and the Church our Mother, siblings each and all in the household of God.  Today we also thank the Lord for the voice of Benedict XVI---on this his first full post-papal day---as he enters into new depths of silence at the heart of the Church and makes intercession for her.  Only in the Risen Lord Jesus, the Word made Flesh, can each of us at last receive our fully restored adult voices, capable in Him of sharing the redemptive meaning even of our suffering and on-going recovery.

Below is the image of Christ on our 2013 Queen of Peace Lenten Holy Card, paired with an accompanying meditation on it which is particularly apt for today:

“He was oppressed, and He was afflicted,
yet He did not open His mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so He did not open His mouth.”

Isaiah 53:6-8

Lord Jesus Christ,

Your silence seems unbearable,

our lives hidden in Your thorned thoughts,

borne on Your shoulders, Good Shepherd,

as a Holy Cross or so many lost sheep to be restored.

In Your Passion for our love of Your love,

You patiently allowed Yourself to be bound

 by the entangled cords of our knotted no’s.

You bounded into the deafness and dumbness of our sin---

 into the suffering of our severing of all the human ties

You had knitted together from the creation of the world---

only to rise from these burial bands glorious and triumphant.

O Eternal Word, restore in us by Your Resurrection

the bonds of friendship uniting Heaven and earth,

that our lives of faith, hope, and charity in Your Church

may openly bear and extend the liberating holy communion

which finds its joy forever in the light of Your Face.

Amen.

 “O Lord, open my lips,

and my mouth shall proclaim Your praise.”

Psalm 51:15