A reading of the holy gospel according to, hold it a minute, Luke. Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. Notice he was in a synagogue. And there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself.
And when Jesus saw the woman, he called her and said to her, woman, you are freed from your infirmity. Then Jesus laid his hands upon her, and immediately she was made straight. And then she praised God. But the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath day, said to the people, there are six days on which to work, and work ought to be done on those days. Come, he says, I suppose to Jesus, come on those days and be healed and not on the Sabbath day.
And then the Lord answered him, you hypocrites, does not each one of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan has bound for eighteen years be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day? As Jesus said this, all his adversaries were put to shame. But the people all rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by Jesus. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. As attractive as it is to comment upon this reading from Saint Luke this morning, I must because I've looked for this opportunity for a long time, go back to the reading from the Ephesians. In this plea from Saint Paul to the Ephesians to be saints, to to cast out all evil, and he mentions these evils, immorality, impurities, hate, all the rest of it, to throw them all out and to be like god, to be to pursue holiness. Now one of the things he asked him to throw out is levity.
Levity. That's what the English says. And that word hit me right between the eyes. I don't know what it means here. I didn't have a chance to look it up.
But it gives me an opportunity of talking about a virtue that I'm willing to wager scarcely any of you have heard mentioned, and that's the virtue of eutropelia. Eutropelia. It's a Greek word, and the closest translation I've come to it is playfulness. Playfulness. Now my authority for this virtue is Saint Thomas Aquinas, a well known saint from the thirteenth century that Leo the thirteenth made slightly popular, but whose son is rather is rather set.
But a man that's lasted since the thirteenth century must have something going for him. Now what I'd like to point out, this virtue of utropelia, which I translate as playfulness or the virtue of play, Thomas Aquinas treats just as seriously as he treats any other virtue of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. And he puts this virtue of playfulness under justice. Now this is all in a sumo. I'm not making this up out of my fertile imagination.
And you and you I can very quickly show you how it he bases it upon justice because we I owe it. We owe it to one another. We owe it to one another as an obligation, as a responsibility, as a debt to be paid, that we do what we can to ease the burden of life. And then Aquinas goes on in some detail to to tell us how this is to be done. Now judging from what I've seen, this is not one of the well known or devoutly practiced virtues.
For example, how many people actually have feel an obligation when they sit down at their dining room table to try to make it pleasant, feeling it as an obligation. That may take some preparation to think over who's going to be there, what could I bring up, what could I tell that would amuse the people, what may bring out a laugh, have a joke or do something to ease the burden of life? They are almost Thomas' exact words. Of course, I I know this goes back to the Greek. He didn't create it.
This isn't something that Aquinas found, but it's something we have lost. We have lost it. And not only have we lost the actuality of it, but we've lost the concept of it as a moral obligation. I doubt that you've ever heard a sermon on it. That doesn't prove much though.
But the thing is, do we think enough about this? Do we work at Remember, virtue isn't something that's innate and inborn. You don't get it with your mother's milk. Virtue is something that has to be worked on. And while we we we throw words around like love and charity and neighborliness and oneness and unity and being together and togetherness and all of this, what does this mean in fact?
Sometimes it's almost crucifying to be with some people. There's a lot of being together and togetherness that I don't want any parts of, and I have no obligation to put myself in the way of it either. So Aquinas and remember, Aquinas was a Dominican. He knew what community life was or wasn't, and he had a conception of what it ought to be. And now let us not get get strung up on this because remember, the truest, the most natural community on God's earth is the community of the family.
And how many people, and I mean even in a fine good family, have a sense of this as an obligation, as a really religious obligation of serving Jesus Christ, that we try by in our playfulness to ease the burden of life for others. I have been reading, it's a long book and I can't read it fast, but the biography of Helen Keller and, of course, her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Now if there's anything which comes out all from all kinds of witnesses and people who knew Helen Keller, you'd agree she was practically she wasn't born, but as an infant she became deaf and blind and of course was not able she was a mute, she was not able to speak until they by marvelous ways they got through to her. But there she was. And what everybody who came into contact with her, even as a very young child all the way up into adulthood and the old age, the what impressed so many people was her deity, was her joyfulness.
And at time and time in her diary, she would be she would write that at the beginning of the day that she's going to try to make tomorrow a perfect day, that is going to be a day of glorious joy. A reporter asked her one day, how can you in your state be so happy? And she says, how can I not be happy? God has given me of my five faculties, she's given me three. The point I'm making, she had this sense of utropelia, believe me, of doing what she could and I don't know how she got it.
I'm not trying to explain that. It's hard to explain where she got a lot of things, but she had a deep rooted sense about this of of and when she would be in a crowd of people, remember she couldn't hear a thing, but she had a sensation when she was in a crowd if things weren't kind of friendly and and we would say, if I'm you'll excuse the word gay. So, of course, we can't use that word anymore. Imagine, we that word has been eliminated from our living rooms, some living rooms. And so I come back to this.
I don't know what Paul means here by levity. And this is I'm not I'm saying that seriously because these are buzzwords. These words are this kind of like as I mentioned this morning in another instance, the you take these words like incubiscence and lust and adultery that were used by our holy father in this statement for his general audience that has caused such a furor among the writers of our daily press. These are buzzwords and you don't solve the problem of going to an unabridged dictionary. And so I want to come back to this.
For what it's worth, Saint Saint Thomas Aquinas offers this virtue of utropelia or playfulness as a very serious obligation on our part. And I I do not think that Saint Paul was asking the good Ephesians to throw it out. That I can't believe. I would rather side with what seems to me to be the safer course and emphasize as Christians the obligation we have to lighten the burden of those we are with. Notice not the Eskimo or the people down in the in the in the South Pole or over in Timbuktu, but the people we're rubbing shoulders with morning, noon, and night, the ones who grate on us, the ones who chafe us, the ones we like to be with or don't like to be with, but what with whom we are thrown together with.
This is the world. These are the people we have the obligation to lighten their burden and the virtue, the name of that is eutropelia. Forget that and remember playfulness as a moral obligation in Christian charity on the authority of nonetheless than Saint Thomas Aquinas, order of preachers founded by Saint Dominic. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.