A Heavy Burden, Hard to Carry

“Mommy, you haven’t been making any sacrifices.”

My daughter was peering through the little opening in the plastic cover of the “sacrifice jar” we made for Lent this year. The repurposed oatmeal container, jazzed up with glitter glue and pictures of St. Therese of Lisieux, was more than half-filled with little slips of paper bearing descriptions of the various sacrifices family members had made for one another.

But she was right: every piece of paper bore the childlike scrawl of herself and her brother. I had not added anything to the sacrifice jar.

“If I wrote down every sacrifice I made for you in just a single day, the jar would explode,” I retorted, and even though my daughter giggled, I instantly regretted the comment, sighing as I realized I did it again. I let a snide, self-pitying thought form on my lips and make its way into the world because for a brief moment I thought someone didn’t appreciate my (imagine me sniffing injuredly here) hard work.

We sneer at the scribes and the Pharisees as Jesus describes them in the Gospel, lengthening their phylacteries and coveting the places of honor. But then I remember: nobody starts out meaning to be a jerk.

We want to do good things. We try to be holy. But it’s hard, that burden weighs heavy on our back.

So, we murmur about it here and there. We stop to catch our breath. We glimpse other people looking at our burden with approval and admiration, and we breathe a little harder, groan a little deeper. And somewhere along the way the burden becomes an idol and our labor a performance. We dare not ask for help bearing it, for we prize too greatly the sweat of our own brow.

“The greatest among you must be your servant.” — Matthew 23:11

©LPi