God follows us, wherever we go – 1 Cor 10:1-6, 10-12.

Preaching on the 2nd reading from yesterday's mass at Sunday Vespers at Moreau Seminary.

We hear a lot about the growing phenomenon of helicopter parents, parents who micro-manage their children’s lives, sometimes well into adulthood.  The caricature of the offspring they raise are dependent fully grown kids, 20-somethings who can’t pick what pair of socks to wear in the morning without phoning home.  The mirror-image we can imagine, or perhaps know, are laissez-faire carefree parents who, it seems, could care less, not providing the resources their children need to form themselves, raising kids with no direction or moral compass, not even the borrowed un-owned one of helicopter’s progeny.

Our heavenly father is neither of these.  He doesn’t need a helicopter to enter into our lives, because he’s always right there: behind us, following us, a rock.  He pours out his caring blessing gratuitously, prodigiously, to all.  Listen to Paul repeat that motif: ‘all.’  All were led and shielded from the harsh sun by the cloud; all escaped from Pharaoh and his armies through the waters; all thereby received the redemption of Exile, that can properly be called a baptism; all ate God’s food; all drank that thirst-quenching water from the rock.  “And the rock was Christ.”

All received, but many grumbled.  Many craved, suffered from misplaced desire and wandered, misdirected from the path.  The rock still followed.  The water still flowed.  He refuses to micro-manage our lives, to force us or even to cajole our feet back.  His constant nourishing presence never denies our freedom, but inspires, feeds it with spiritual food.  We wander still.  Our pilgrimage is not the straight-line that in deepest desires we want it to be, because we crave so much else besides and we can’t just turn those cravings off.

Sometimes we catch that misplaced foot.  We hear an echo of our grumble; or we find ourselves convicted by our reading of scripture; or a friend calls us out; or maybe there’s something a little more attention-grabbing like a snake attack or a destroying angel.  God’s right behind us.  He’s been following the whole time.  The rock.  The rock whose water quenches every thirst.  This Lent, no matter how far we’ve wandered, we have only to turn, and kneel, and drink.