Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B; Immaculate Conception and Chapel of Mary.
Journey and homecoming
are two themes that fascinate us. Some of the oldest stories we know, like
Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, involve journeys and going home. More recently, we
have The Wizard of Oz, so such classics as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,
or even Spiderman: Homecoming. Maybe journeys fascinate us so much
because that’s how God is saving us.
We’re not at home. Have you noticed how in the Hail,
Holy Queen we recite after the rosary, we call ourselves “poor banished children
of Eve”? Or that feeling inside that this world isn’t as it should be, it’s not
our abiding home? God has better in store for us. And we, deep in our bones, in
our inherited memories, remember that it was better once. Humanity’s origins
were glorious. We were created to live lives of perfect love, loving self,
neighbor, God, and creation with full integrity. But we turned away from that.
We chose pride and we chose shame. That’s the fall.
But God isn’t OK with leaving us there. God is
acting to bring us home. And that looks like journey on our end. Sure, God
could snap the divine fingers, or click the divine ruby-slipper-covered heals
together, and bring us wherever He wants, but that’s not God’s dream God’s vision
for us either. God, for reasons no logic but love can account for, doesn’t want
to destroy us and create new perfect loving beings in our stead. He wants to
save us, to redeem us, to make us holy, to make us loving, to bring us home.
And that looks like journey for us. It looks like step by step, little by
little, walking towards holiness. And it’s slow, because that’s how God slowly
reforms us without destroying us, so it’s genuinely us who become holy, who
become able to keep on freely choosing love forever, which is what Eden was
meant to be, and what heaven is.
We cannot make that journey without Christ. Our
reading from the letter to the Hebrews gives us a vivid image for how that has
happened: Christ has passed through the heavens, and that allows us to approach
the throne of grace to receive mercy. In another place in the letter, Jesus is
described as a pioneer. He has walked the way, he has opened the door, he has
left us footprints, and it remains for us to follow.
His footprints reflect his profound sharing in
human weakness, a sharing that’s perfect. Hebrews tells us that he shared with
us in all things but sin, and that isn’t a limitation of how intensely he
shared in the human condition, but the fullness of it; for it is not in sin that
we discover who we are as humans. Sin always takes away from that. Sin
distances us not just from God and neighbor, but even from ourselves. Christ
knows what it is to be human even more fully than we do, because our sin, our
pride and our shame, stops us truly even knowing ourselves, yet alone neighbor
or God.
We are not walking this journey alone. We are walking
it together with one another, and with Christ both as the pioneer and goal, and
as our faithful companion. We have in Catholic theology a fancy word for being “on
the way together,” and that word is Synod. (Syn, together; hodos,
way). Pope Francis has recently asked us a Church to commit even more fully to
being a synodal Church, a Church that is on the way together. There are some
formal processes that our part of that, consultations at the diocesan level
now, and later at the level of bishops meeting together in different groupings.
But the formal processes are just a tool to help us do better what we’ve always
been called to do: to be on the way together.
I’m in the middle of teaching Christmas Carol
in one of my classes at Stonehill. At first sight, that’s not a movie about a
journey (no one ever leaves London in it), but in a deeper way it is; it’s
about Scrooge’s journey to start caring about other people, desiring community
and family, and thereby finding happiness. His first turning point, I think,
comes, when he and the Ghost of Christmas Present look in on the Cratchit
family Christmas. Ebenezer, for the first time, really attends to Tiny Tim, and
asks, out of genuine concern for another, “will he live?” It’s the ghost of
Christmas future that shows him a future in which Tiny Tim does not live.
Seeing what love looks like when a family is grieving, Ebenezer then turns to
the ghost and says, “I have seen enough.” Learning to truly attend to another is
Scrooge’s journey, is what brings him to a place of love, generosity, even
holiness, and thereby joy. We are on a journey to those same ends. Being
synodal is realizing that we are on that journey together, and learning new
ways to really attend to each other, to a large extent, is the
journey. Realizing we are on the journey together is how we get home.
No comments:
Post a Comment