Oh, you Pharisees! Although you cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, inside you are filled with plunder and evil. You fools! Did not the Maker of the outside also make the inside? But as to what is within, give alms, and behold, everything will be clean for you (Luke 11: 39-41).

These opening remarks didn’t bode well for a pleasant repast together! But that day, the Lord put pleasantries aside to address something more vital: inner motivation and the state of the soul.

He sensed, or saw, "plunder and evil," and so much more as the story will reveal. Yet he also provided his host with a way out, a way to inner purity and freedom: "give alms."

In the New Testament, the word for "alms" comes from the same root as the word for "mercy." To give alms is to commit oneself to Mercy, showing to others in a gesture what one has in fact received from the Lord oneself. The season of Lent, with its call to pray, fast, and give alms reminds us of how central this gesture is to our Christian commitment.

Are you one of those who receive piles of requests from all sorts of organizations begging your assistance? Were you moved to help one or two, only to find your name suddenly appearing on the mailing lists of ten or twenty?

It is a real task to sort that out, to determine whom the Lord wants you to help. Some years there is more to share, some less.

Madonna House itself is one of those groups that come to your mailbox, hat in hand so to speak, asking for your assistance twice a year. For without the generosity of our benefactors and friends, our work would cease to exist. (P.S. We don’t pass on our mailing list!)

But today I don’t have in mind that class of almsgiving—necessary and honorable as it is—but the other kind, the giving in kind that is part and parcel of family and community life.

It, too, has an endless quality about it. For almsgiving—the showing in a gesture of mercy that which one has received oneself—is the very life-blood, if you will, of living together. Without this gift, life together ceases.

A community like ours here in Combermere is a network of services rendered, services knit together by a common commitment to the Gospel.

There are on average 150 of us here, if you include the Training Centre (main house), St. Mary’s, and the farm, and keeping the place functional and relatively peaceful is no small task. It requires—in addition to prayer and fasting—an incredible generosity.

I call it the generosity of the "Fixed Commitment." You know what I mean by that? Of course you do.

In Madonna House the Fixed Commitment of many persons means that three meals are served every day, that work is organized and dispensed in a couple of dozen departments; that snow paths are shoveled in winter, gardens planted in spring, hay cut and stored in summer, turnips dug and stored in autumn; that Mass is carefully prepared and offered daily year round, that guests are welcomed, toured, and integrated into the community life.

It means that clothes get washed and ironed and folded or hung up so that their owners have clean laundry. It means artifacts of beauty are encouraged and the methods of creating them passed on. It means classes are prepared and given on numerous topics. It means machinery is repaired, cars checked, donations sorted and stored or passed on.

It means, in short: giving, giving, giving. To be part of a family, to be part of a community like ours, means to be caught, caught, caught in a network of service.

Have you ever wanted to fly out of the net? Did you ever run away from a network like this, just so you could escape the obligations put on you by family, friends, and acquaintances?

Did you ever feel like you were being crushed to dust by the relentlessness of demands from the kids, your spouse, your in-laws, the neighbors, the parish? Did you then feel "blown away" by the winds of exhaustion that came out in a sigh rising from the very depths of your soul?

Speaking of the term "net," it’s been most "interesting" serving for over three years now as one of the directors of Madonna House!

Being an MH director can seem like being in the Ultimate Net in community living. For in this position, you are at the service of anybody and everybody who has anything to do with Madonna House, starting with staff and ending who knows where.

I must admit it’s hard to leave mention of prayer and fasting out of the picture, because only these make ongoing almsgiving possible. Not just for someone in my position, but for mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, and all those committed to life in communion with others. You’ve got to let it all work on you, purify you, grind you down and wear you out.

Until? Until temptations besiege you, and the desire to quit seeks to entice you, and you reach the very bottom of your soul, where, you discover, "plunder and evil," abide, and selfishness and greed, anger and lust, envy and sloth, unkindness and even murder. It’s all lurking there, like snakes curled up in a lair (see Luke 11: 47-51).

But, miraculously, one gesture cleanses the lot! And what is that gesture? The willingness to give—one more time. The "yes"—to just this next request. Putting the body in motion so that, yes, it seems like a mere "going through the motions"—yet again.

It is somewhere in the midst of all this that the heart breaks open anew to the grace of Christ. What you and I cannot do, what we do not have in us to accomplish, he does in us, through the gesture of mercy consented to, yet again.

When we acquiesce to this way of living, he lives in us a bit more, and to that extent, "everything is made clean within."

For He who is Purity and Mercy takes up residence in us, loves through us, rests near his Father’s heart in us. All this happens when we "give alms" in obedience to Christ, who is ever at work through it all, showing his Face to the world, making all things new.