Moreau Lucenarium, Feast of St. Edward the Confessor, 2011; I've just come off retreat, so no preaching this past week. Here's an old one from last Fall. I'm about to leave for some time in Haiti, so I won't post again for a couple of weeks.
I
remember the first time I saw St. Edward the Confessor, today’s saint (and
patron not just of Fr. Sorin but also of ___ ___, our cantor – wish him a
happy feast at the social!).
I
first saw him in the Bayeux tapestry, which is basically an 11th
Century comic strip, almost as long as a football field, depicting the run-up
to and execution of the Norman Conquest of England in which St. Edward features
rather prominently. Here are two
interesting things about the Bayeux tapestry – it’s not from Bayeux, and it’s
not a tapestry. The Bayeux name comes
from where it was found after being lost for a few hundred years, but why it’s
called a tapestry is rather a mystery to me given that it’s actually an
embroidery.
Now,
for those of you not up on your textile art, let me explain the difference: a
tapestry is made by taking a bunch of colored threads and weaving them together
to make a pattern or a picture. An
embroidery is where you take an already woven piece of cloth (beige in this
case) and sew pieces of thread into it to make patterns or pictures. Maybe people call it a tapestry because
they’re so enamoured with the action in the pictures that they miss the cloth
they’re sown into. And that’s a shame.
…Because
life is an embroidery, not a tapestry.
The world is not just a bunch of threads that hold themselves together;
the world is held on, suspended in, a seamless cloth. Like those images in the Bayeux embroidery,
we have form only because each and every stitch that makes us up is knotted in
to God. You and I can only exist in
relationship together in the same space because the space between us is full of
God. The Spirit is within and between
us, enveloping us and, as Paul says here, searching us and praying for us.
Romans
8, the chapter our reading is drawn from, is Paul’s gospel of hope. In fact, just two verses before the start of
our reading comes the line Pope Benedict used as the title of one of his
encyclicals: in hope, we are saved; Spe salvi. The link between hope and the Spirit’s
enveloping and penetrating of us is key to the logic of this chapter of Romans
and the Holy Father draws it out beautifully in his encyclical, telling us: it is in prayer that we learn hope. If there is no one to listen, God
listens. If I have no one to talk to, I
have God. If there is no one to meet
some need or desire that goes beyond the human capacity for hope, I hope in
God.
Friends,
if true hope is hope in God; true hope is also hope for
something, hope for salvation.
The pervasiveness of the Spirit is the pervasiveness of our crucified
and risen savior. Resurrection is the
hue of the cloth in which we are sown. Recall
the chain of verbs that closes our reading: foreknow,
predestine, call, justify, glorify.
This chain shows the relentless action of God – God never relents from
loving us; God never relents from pushing us onwards to live out the glory that
Jesus won for us.
The
resurrection is not an exception or an irruption into the normal course of human
affairs – it is the cloth we’re knit into.
It is the true normal.
I
would wish you a glorious break – and a glorious life – but someone much more
powerful than me has already done that!
