The Master Potter

Dear Friend,

This week I found myself conversing with folks about pottery of all things. In a way I hadn’t been before, I was reminded: through seemingly simple gestures, master potters – in what is likely the most ancient of arts – accomplish an extraordinarily complex magic in texture and form with mud and clay. Mud and clay, obedient to fingers charged with muscle memory honed over years draw close to the potter’s own mind and something beautiful comes to be. They make it look so simple!

All this was timely for me as I pondered this Sunday’s Gospel. The disciples see someone driving out demons in the name of Jesus and they try to stop him “because he does not follow us.” Leave him alone, says Jesus, as though to say, my Father is working with him, look what beautiful things are happening. Saint Paul might well have been thinking along these lines when he urged his new-born communities to “put on the mind of Christ.” Such a “mind,” or we might say “mind-set” or lens, can draw our eyes and hearts and hands into a beauty-making that is expansive and even awe-inspiring.

For a taste of the opposing attitude, listen to this week’s segment of the Letter of James. The rich who withhold wages from their workers and who “fatten” their own selfish hearts live in a luxury and pleasure of their own making and it’s outright ugly. Refusing to give themselves to the master potter, they are in essence putting to death the very Christ who “offers no resistance,” obedient to his Father to the end.  

Prepare to be shaken by the Liturgy of the Word this Sunday. Personally, I’m glad we’re not asked to handle such intensity every week. 

Gratefully, 

Father Dan