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(This reflection is based on two of the readings for the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time — Romans 8:9,11-13 and Matthew 11:25-30.)

I’ll make a confession:  even now, there are weekends when I tune out during the second reading.  Paul writes about abstract ideas.  He often uses long, convoluted sentences.  Paul hardly ever tells a juicy story that’s easy to remember.

That said, Paul’s writings are essential to our understanding of our faith.  Paul advises us how we can live this complex thing called “Christianity.”  And ideas don’t get much more essential than the passage we heard today.  Paul tells us that we must live “in the Spirit,” not “in the flesh.”  Lots of people confuse this with an older philosophy that taught that the material world is evil and only other-worldly pursuits are good.  That’s not what our Judeo-Christian belief teaches us.  Everything God creates is good.  How can our material world and our bodies be intrinsically bad?  As Catholics, we’re guilty of this “soul—good, body—bad” theology when we praise only those people who flee from the day-to-day realities of living in the world.  Our lives can be just as holy while we work and live in “the real world,” with all its complexities.

Need further proof?  Look at Paul himself.  Despite his convoluted sentences and abstract ideas, Paul was a man of action.  We presume that he walked thousands of miles on his missionary journeys.  His hands were from calloused from his work as a canvas maker.  Paul encouraged others to use their worldly talents for the good of the church.  He asked Lydia to bankroll his travels away from her hometown.  He urged Phoebe to use her business connections to deliver messages (including the letter to the Romans).  He sent Prisca and Aquila out as his “advance” team to set up new Christian communities.  Paul lived a life of the Spirit, but he also lived an earthy, physical life.

I struggle more with reconciling Paul’s life with our gospel passage today.  Jesus says that God reveals the Truth to those who are childlike, but Paul told the Corinthians that when he became a man, he put aside childish things (1 Corinthians 13:11). Jesus says that “my yoke is easy.”  Yet Paul suffered imprisonments, beatings, and shipwrecks, not to mention threats of inhospitable weather, hunger, and robbery, all to carry out the work of Christ (2 Corinthians 11:23-27).  It sounds as if his yoke was anything but easy.

The first thing we need to know is that the Greek word that’s translated as “easy” has nothing to do with weight.  It means that the yoke fits well on the one who carries it.  So, perhaps we can think of Jesus saying, “you are well suited to carry this yoke.”  I think the key is determining who or what has fashioned the yoke we carry.  Do we carry a yoke of the flesh?  Are we caught in the rat race, working for “the man,” running ourselves ragged to access material pleasures?  Such a yoke may well lead to a spiritual death.  Yet a life “in the Spirit” can also burden us with a yoke of complexity.  It’s a question of doing the same things with a different attitude.  If God has entrusted other people to our care, we may work long hours in order to provide security for them. Our professional labor may help to bring forth the kingdom.  Our leisure time may be a way of praising the God who makes all good things.  It’s a way of singing the ancient “lauda, laude” again in a new way.

Paulist founder Isaac Hecker gave his most famous homily on a similar topic.  He was preaching about St. Joseph, husband of Mary and step-father of Jesus.   Joseph, too, was a person of action.  Talk about complexity:  he found himself serving as the human protector of the incarnate God.  There were no guidebooks and no instructions on how to do it.  Joseph opened himself to the Holy Spirit and made it up as he went along.  Hecker said that it is the obligation of every person to live “in the Spirit” in our workplaces, in our marketplaces, in our homes, in all our relationships.  (“The Saint of Our Day,” March 19, 1863.)  We must testify that the world in which we live can be holy.

A theology professor of mine said that to be adults, we must be able to embrace the complexities of life.  Like Paul and Joseph (and Lydia, Phoebe, Prisca, and Aquila), our yokes may not be lightweight.  And the path we must plow may not be straightforward.  But the One who has given us the yoke has a plan.  And maybe if we could see things from the Spirit’s viewpoint, it wouldn’t seem so complicated.  If we trust in the Spirit’s direction with a childlike faith, surely everything we do is a form of praise to the God of All Good Things.

As Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz wrote in MASS:

Sing God a simple song:  lauda, laude.
Make it up as you go along:  lauda, laude.
Sing like you like to sing.
God loves all simple things,
For God is the simplest of all.
For God is the simplest of all.