Jesus moves us – Mark 1:14-20

3rd Week of OT, Year B; Holy Infant.

I know someone who fell in love while dancing to a Beatles song, but not exactly to the person she was dancing with. Let me back up. When I was at Notre Dame, one Spring break I led a bunch of students on a trip to spend a week at a L’Arche house. L’Arche houses are places community where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers, creating communities of faith and friendship. I taught a class where for the first half of the semester, we studied the L’Arche movement and the spiritual and theological principles that undergird it, then we spent Spring break living it and the rest of the semester unpacking that experience. One of my students told me afterwards that she was going to apply to spend a year living as part of one of their communities. “I still want to be an attorney,” she told me. “I still want to help people professionally in that way, maybe run for office someday, but I need more of this first.” “Can you expand that, what’s ‘this’ for you?” I asked her. And that’s when she told me about the Beatles song. We’d been in the kitchen, preparing dinner. The student had shown up a minute or so late to the work shift, and there wasn’t really anything for her to do, all the tasks had been assigned. She told me how frustrating this was, as she’d come here to help people, but then that opening harmonica riff of “Love, love me do” came on the radio, and one of the core members (the community members with intellectual disabilities), asked her to dance. It was while dancing that she realized that there’s something more fundamental than helping people, and that’s loving, loving life, loving people. I encouraged her to remember that moment of clarity, that delightful dance, whether that be through journaling, telling her story to others, sketching it, whatever works for her, because things won’t always feel that naturally easy, even if objectively they’ll still be just as beautiful.

God shows us loving dwelling – John 1:3b-10, 19

2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B; Holy Infant parish.

There are some questions that don’t allow for short answers, that open things up that can’t be simply put back in their can. “Harry, how was it you got that scar again?” “Ishmael, did you ever happen to meet a ship’s captain, name of Ahab?” “What an interesting piece of jewelry around your neck, Frodo!” Well, when the disciples ask Jesus, “where are you staying?” that ends up being one of those questions too, whose answer is very much longer than the question.