5TH SUNDAY OF EASTER, 2021

Acts 9-26-31 1 John 3:18-24 John 15:1-8

On one of my last retreats at the Trappist Monastery in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, I gave myself a stress test by running up a long, steep hill. And then, sitting on a park bench at the top of the hill, I gazed intently and for a long time at the lush green field grass stretching out in front of me for as far as I could see. It was like the ocean, I kept thinking, with its windswept waves marching by in such well-defined order. Living and working as I had for so many years in a world made up more of plastic and aluminum than of vegetation and sky, this was a rare sensual experience for me, a joy to be remembered.

It occurred to me to think for a while as might a less scientific person of Jesus’ day and to regard the wind as a force whose origin I could not know. I had to ignore even my layman’s knowledge of convection currents, of heated air rising and cooled air falling, and so on. For these precious moments it had to be just an invisible, uncontrollable force that worked powerfully wherever and whenever it pleased. It was something full of mystery.

Mystery suggests curiosity about what is not completely revealed. The usual and appropriate response to mystery is excitement, the desire to discover, the thrill of moving ever closer, but never comprehending, an attraction that cannot ever be exhausted. How dull life would be without it. How close we are today to living such a flat existence, when we have uncovered so many of nature’s secrets and try futilely to find our excitement in things our machines have made, that are so narrowly specific in their purpose that they leave no room for imagination, for ingenuity, for improvisation, for the thrill of discovery.

And what can we say about the special loves and the ordinary friendships that fill our lives? At their best these are also meant to be signs that we love one another in an increasingly unselfish way. In those relationships we can also explore the unique mystery of each other, making us more and more united and nourishing us for the journey still ahead. Like the wind, the journey does not reveal itself completely: there is mystery about how it began, where it has been, and about where it is going.

Several years ago, a popular songwriter and rock musician publicly proclaimed that he had nothing to do with the “nonsense” — as he called it — of dating and conversation at the soda store and meeting each other’s folks and all that. “We get down to what everybody’s looking for,” he proclaimed. What an empty and deceptive conquest, what a destructive teaching for our youngsters, that anyone should treat so disdainfully the aspect of sweet mystery in the human relationship of love.

These weeks of Easter are filled with the anticipation of “ruha”, a Hebrew word for “wind” and adapted by Christians as a synonym for Spirit, the Spirit whom the Risen Jesus promised to send us. The Church waits and works its way to Pentecost in anticipation of the gifts that Spirit will bring. We are confident that, like a tender and patient lover, the Spirit will lead us gently, if we are willing, and make us happy by revealing truth to us as we need it and want it. The Spirit will purify us into greater goodness and enable us to love and be loved beyond our greatest longings.

We have to deliberately choose that transformation, otherwise we may never experience it.

And so I wish you a happy Easter and a Pentecost full of love and peace — and mystery!

Photo by Christian on Unsplash

CHRIST THE KING, 2020

I found out again last week that my age is showing! I was on the check-out line at Costco carrying a box with four rather heavy items in it. The man in back of me almost immediately said, “Why not put that box in my carriage? When you reach the counter, I’ll put it there for you.”

I thanked him and called him a Good Samaritan. We did not exchange names, but we soon parted as friends.

That vignette I share with you as an introduction to this homily on the feast of Christ the King. The very name of the feast suggests the trappings of royalty: a man sitting on a throne, a scepter in his hand, a crown on his head, servants surrounding him, etc.

Trust me: that’s not what this celebration is about. The theme is rather the transformation of worldly authority to the divine authority of love. Jesus said that he had not come to be served but to serve others. Everything that he said and did during his three-or-so years of ministry among the people that he so loved was obviously motivated by deep love of them and of the God he claimed had sent him.

We are his extension into the world now that he has been crucified for his loving ways and has been rescued from death by the God he called Father. In a sense, this is our feast day also. We celebrate him, whom we have come to know as our brother, and the one true God, our Father, as we again pledge ourselves to live our lives here on Earth in LOVE — always in LOVE — love of stranger as well as of friend.

That is how his “kingship” shows itself in our day, not in dramatic stories of imagined royal life, but in words and actions rooted in love by good people everywhere and around us.

That’s what we are celebrating — and that’s what we are promising today: that, as well as we can, we will live in love for all the people who fill our lives in whatever way.

That includes the persons we are most closely and intimately bonded to, as well as the persons behind us at the supermarket.

It’s a wonderful world!

CORPUS CHRISTI, 2019

John, do you take Mary, here present, to be your lawful wife…? I do.

Mary, do you take John, here present, to be your lawful husband…? I do.

They are holding hands, drawing each other to themselves as they say the key word, “take,” and they pledge mutual love and faithful union through an unforeseeable future.

Jesus made the same pledge to us, his followers, when he said over the bread, “This is my body…take and eat from it; this is the cup of my blood…take and drink from it.”

What he said is related to the vows that married couples make to each other, but, I would suggest, not to be taken literally, in a physical sense. They refer rather to the person of Jesus — and to the loving, caring, sharing, giving, reassuring, sacrificing, accepting that belong to a life-exchanging relationship.

That’s what Eucharist is about: a union of life and love. Surely you’ve noticed that persons who are very close to each other over a long period of time take on one another’s characteristics. As I have heard it said so often, “Live with another person long enough, and you begin to look and act like them.”

It’s true, and that’s what is happening to you and me as we live with Jesus through the Eucharist.

I’ve chosen to remind you here again of the brilliant article written by the late Monsignor Gerald Martin in America Magazine some 20 years ago, the most enlightening words that I have ever read on the topic of Eucharist. He wrote: “Jesus did not institute the Eucharist to change bread and wine into his body and blood, but to change us into his body.” Here are quotes from Father Martin:

The Mass is not meant to transform elements, but to transform people. When Jesus said, “Behold, I am with you always until the end of the world, he was not referring to his real presence in the sacrament of Eucharist: he was referring to his real presence in his people, in you and me, the members of his mystical body on earth.

Jesus said, “Do this in memory of me…” What did this refer to? Did Jesus mean “Say these words, use these elements and these gestures in memory of me?” Father Martin answered, by no means.

Jesus had said, “This is my body that is given up for you. This is the cup of my blood which is poured out for you.” “Do this in memory of me” means “In memory of me you should imitate my self-giving which is represented in these symbols of bread broken and wine poured out. When you take and eat, you enter into this action and commit yourself to imitate my self-giving in your own life.”

We should desire, expect, and anticipate just such a transformation in our own life. That’s the meaning of Eucharist.