Monday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
To sigh: emit a long, deep audible breath expressing sadness, relief, fatigue, or similar.
In Much Ado About Nothing, Balthazar describes how women sigh deepest in their frustration with men:
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny nonny– William Shakespeare
Today Mark tells us that Jesus sighed from the depth of his spirit.
As you go through your day, notice how many times and under what circumstances you sigh. Maybe you’ll be able to identify with some on this list:
- We sigh when we’re frustrated, disappointed, discouraged, or exasperated.
- We sigh when our leaders choose power over principle.
- We sigh when the world doesn’t make sense.
- We sigh when it seems nothing that needs to be changed has changed or is changing.
- We sigh because we are in the middle of February and spring is five weeks away.
Sheakspeare’s “Hey, nonny, nonny” translates to “well, that’s life.” Such insight may help us to move through the inevitable sighing of life.
For Jesus, the religious leaders elicited his deepest sighs—self-righteous ones ready to pounce, wanting him to falter. Severe religiosity can do that to people. The hyper religious of his day were never satisfied; never appreciative of anything he did. “Christ on the cross wouldn’t please them,” my mother would say. We all have had such people in our lives. Jesus faced them too. “Hey, nonny nonny.”
There will always be people of negativity and discontent. In the end we may have to let them go, placing them in the hands of God and moving on. Nobody has a right to beat us up emotionally or spiritually or to regurgitate all over us. “Christ on the cross wouldn’t please them.” No “hey, nonny nonny” about it.
Yet we too can exasperate and frustrate. Do we elicit the sighing of others? Do we sometimes make Jesus “sigh deeply?”
To that “hey nonny nonny” can never be our final response. For here change is demanded of us all–achieved through honest self-assessment.
And the opportunity of Lent is but 9 days away.
-Timothy J. Cronin