by Father Thomas Catania

“Get off my property!” I can remember to this day the little boy next door to me, only a few years younger than I was, demanding that I step back the few inches that he saw distinguishing his “territory” from mine. We’d had an argument, and he was not about to allow me the inches that separated what (at nine years of age) he thought was “his” and I (at eleven) assumed was indeed “his.”
The City of New York, as you all know, is far more exacting when it comes to property division than Bobby ever was, but the City, unlike Bobby, can make for troubles over that inch or two. Ever had a property tax dispute?
Turf wars are unpleasant, and, if you think of the Hatfields and the McCoys of yester-century, you may assume that, like Bobby’s fight with me, they are, for the most part, things of the past. If you think of the more immediate gang wars that still plague many of our cities — why do we all know the terms “Crips” and “Bloods” with a horror that “Jets” and “Sharks” no longer elicit? — you will realize that they are by no means a matter of an uncivilized past. Of course they are not, because they are built into the human sense that I am, at least in part, defined by what I have, what I can lay claim to.
Bobby is wherever he is today; the Jets and the Sharks are part of musical history, but the Bloods and the Crips are still a part of the terror that seizes neighborhoods on either side of the United States, and, of course, more “sophisticated” gangs like Al Qaeda terrify the whole world.
My property, though, remains the tacit argument; don’t go where I don’t want you to go, because if you do, I will lose power.

Power Struggle
Isn’t it amazing how much we all want power? You may say, reading this, that power is the last thing you are concerned to acquire or hold on to, but then why would we have the conflicts within the relatively civilized bodies that make up our Congress were there not a tremendous concern for power? “Principle,” some will claim, directs the conflict, but alas, say what war was not nominally fought over principle: The Catholic/Protestant 30 Years’ War? The Civil War in the United States? The Crusades? To read the partisan statements, one would have to assume that lofty principles directed them all, but to see the results, and to review the evidence, a struggle for power energized them all.

Intruding on Our Turf
In fact, it remains the issue when property owners in our area find themselves threatened by the arrival of “new people.” It may not be that these “new people” are dirty or hostile or even impolite. They are “new,” and they are a threat to our long-standing “power,” our control. Why would a marriage threaten a family unless there was some sense somewhere that the “new” people would disrupt the order (the control, the power) that the old order exercised fairly comfortably until this intrusion?
Maybe to our comfort, we hear today in the Gospel a figure who is represented as a canonized saint — and, within the tradition, one associated with “love” — saying “we tried to stop him [from expelling demons] because he is not of our company.” He is not one of us. He belongs to a different band. He shouldn’t be intruding on our turf.
To our comfort, I say, because we still have this kind of conflict, and it has nothing to do with the Jets, the Sharks, the Bloods or the Crips, but it is equally furious, if more sophisticated. The hostility that Mark is describing, and attributing to the time of the historical Jesus in his narrative, is in fact a hostility that the nascent Jesus-community (supposedly founded on love) experienced. That conflict continues today and continues to tear asunder the fabric of our common faith. That it existed so far back, to the very origins of our heritage, may at least give us cause for hope that we can rise again beyond the division that Mark’s story describes.
There is always a tendency to feel more secure if the parameters of our “identity” are clearly described. This, of course, is why the great wars of religion were fought in the 17th century and why Catholics were so distrusted in (originally) Protestant America. “Get off my property!”
But today the issue for us Catholics may be within our own turf. The Jets and the Sharks, the Bloods and the Crips are part of a world we have to confront with unified courage. It cannot be that we can say “we tried to stop [him] because he is not of our company.” We cannot afford that kind of territorialism. It would defeat the very purpose of the Gospel, as Jesus makes clear — “anyone who is not against us is with us” — were we to set up great barricades dividing those who see things our way from those who do not, when all of these people are “expelling demons” by virtue of their God-given compassion and their readiness to welcome into God’s fold the very ones whom Jesus reached out to — the marginalized, the rejected, those who were sure that because of the dictates of the institution, they had no place in the realm of God.
“Our property” is actually the “property” God wants to build as His own. And the Gospel makes clear that He had room for lots of people who are not “certified” by my standards. Well, it is God’s kingdom. Get off His property? I’d rather not.

Father Catania is an English professor at Molloy College, Rockville Centre, L.I., and an assistant at Holy Child Jesus parish, Richmond Hill.

Readings for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Numbers 11: 25-29
Psalm 19: 8, 10, 12-13, 14
James 5:1-6
Mark 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48