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.
I wonder
if anyone told the disciples to treasure that moment when Jesus called them.
That moment when it was so easy for them to drop their nets and follow. Mark
isn’t really concerned to dwell on their psychological state, to wonder what
made them so ready to follow someone they didn’t know. But they did. And they
did so freely, Jesus doesn’t force anything out of them. But, somehow, his
presence is so compelling that they follow. What must have been burning in
their hearts to fuel that kind of daring action?
And it’s
wonderful that we start there. In Mark’s gospel, this is the beginning of Jesus’
public ministry. Mark narrates the baptism, then the temptation in the
wilderness, then goes straight to this calling of disciples. Over the next few
weeks before Lent, we’ll hear more of the early days of Jesus’ ministry, and it’ll
be success story after success story: first the calling of the disciples, then
a series of healings. And that is a wonderful place to start, to be reminded
both of what an amazingly compelling presence Jesus and that humans were able
to have their hearts and feet moved by this. Because even in these disciples,
we know that found it within themselves to hold back at times. Mark will point
out again and again in his gospel that Jesus’ disciples didn’t get it during
his earthly ministry, were especially slow to understand Jesus’ predictions of
his Passion, and when the Passion actually began, ran and scattered.
We find
this too. I hope we’ve all had times in our lives both when things felt
completely right, when our hearts and our feet were moved, and we know Jesus is
close and doing amazing things. When we feel like that, we need to cherish it.
Because it won’t always feel like that. If it didn’t always for St. Peter, we
shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t for us. And there are things we can do to
try to hold on to those moments that God gives us. First is just identifying them.
Maybe they’re obvious to you, but often they talk some reflection to draw out.
One of the first exercises we do as novices, as new member in my religious
order, the Congregation of Holy Cross, is to write a spiritual autobiography, a
history of our life to that point with attention to the movements of the Spirit,
and I learnt a lot, about myself and about God, from being made to write out
what I thought was already in my head. The next step is to cherish them. To
work out what that looks like for each of us. Maybe it’s being attentive to
anniversaries, but it’s revisiting important places, like the spot you got
engaged or married. I know for me, whenever I’m back in our basilica at the
center of Notre Dame’s campus, where I both professed my perpetual vows and
later was ordained priest, walking over the spot where I knelt for both those
actions remind me of the wonder and amazement of those, the sense of being so
closely held and supported, not that I might always feel cozy, but that I might
be deeply rooted enough that I could reach out. It’s refreshing, it renews me.
Today,
we’re celebrating the Sunday liturgy (anticipated), but that doesn’t stop it
from still being January 20th, the feast day of the founder of my
religious order, Blessed Basil Moreau. Moreau founded Holy Cross is post-revolution
France to breathe new life into parish life and Christian education. He was
insistent that Holy Cross was to be formed on the model of a family. The
Jesuits, for instance, were founded by Ignatius of Loyola, the ex-soldier, on
the model of the military because he knew that model was great for getting
things done. But, Moreau knew that post-revolution government was pretty good
at getting things done, and what France (and the other countries he wanted to
expand to) needed was a model of something more humane, more loving, more
familial. I think that maybe his greatest moment of feeling this compelling
presence of Jesus was in his family home growing up. He didn’t stay there, he
couldn’t, but through founding and nurturing Holy Cross he kept that alive, he
shared and sustained that moment, just as it sustained him, even when things
were very difficult. May Christ help us to do the same. Bl. Basile Moreau, pray
for us.
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