Journey

Saturday, October 24, 2020                (today’s lectionary)

Journey

Our grandkids are 11, 8, nearly 4 and 1. And aren’t they growing fast, and growing up? We are really proud of them. We’ve run much of our race and they are barely starting theirs.

Build up the Body of Christ until we all attain the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God. Bring us to maturity to the extent of the full stature of Christ, so we may no longer be infants.

At the beginning of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, three escaped convicts in Mississippi join up for a bit with a blind oracle pushing his handcar down the Columbus and Greenville Railway.

“I have no name,” the blind man says. “But I know that you are bound to find a treasure, although it will not be the treasure you seek.”

Why were these guys in prison? And what treasure will they find? The Coen Brothers made their own version of Homer’s Odyssey, and we just wait and see.

What treasures will seduce and disappoint our boys and girl? What will turn them back to the pearl of great price? Jasper, Miles, Aly and Jack live every day from start to finish. We watch them grow, wait for what happens next, and blind to the future like the railroad man, look to what there is to see right now.

We are tossed by waves, swept along by anything and everything, but living the truth in love lets us change all that and grow into him. In Christ the whole body is joined and held together. Every part functions with every other part.

We’d hoped to visit an exhibition of Edward Hopper’s paintings this weekend in Indianapolis, but every ticket is already sold. Even so, those paintings are rich in my imagination. Three men and a woman, nighthawks, drinking late night coffee from two tall urns.Don’t these people even want to sleep? An elderly couple just down from their room wait for a wartime taxi. A lone woman reads. The night is young, but in the hotel lobby it seems completely without promise.

Why do I want to sit for hours with paintings that sound so depressing, paintings of loneliness and sad, separate lives. I don’t know, actually. But Hopper’s simple people-scapes will not let me go. The exhibit’s sold out, so I guess I’m not alone.

Tended by Christ, who is the head, our corporate body grows and builds itself up in love.

Sometimes I’m afraid of so much hope. Paul’s vision of unity and communal growth sparked by Jesus, is just that: a vision. What I see in front of me is quite another matter altogether. The hotel lobby and late night diner are bleak and dark.

It’s only when I turn all the way around and completely change my perspective that I see what’s wrong. I’ve got ahead of God again. My sight, my steps and even my prayers are askew, crooked and going nowhere. Here’s how Clarence Heller puts it:

Such a delusion to imagine that we could ever pray to God, a being somehow separate, even distant from us

When actually all prayer originates in God.

God’s Spirit prays in us always and separation from God is, well … nonsense.

And so my prayer has become silent. I listen to the unformed words God speaks through my spirit,

And my response is to say yes, giving consent, to love.

In this listening God has plenty to say. Ignatius invites me to ask three questions of myself in this listening.

1. What have I done for Christ?
2. What am I doing for Christ?
3. What ought I to do for Christ?

Leaning into these questions allows God’s spirit to penetrate my ego and my self. As Jesuit Kevin O’Brien says, “Just as our sin is reflected in concrete decisions and acts, so too does grace come to life in choices and deeds done for the love of Christ and others.”

My ego implores me to hurry up and do those good deeds. But there is no hurry. Jesus buys us time, even if it’s not eternal. My job is just to keep my eyes open, and do whatever comes next.

Leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it, fertilize it. It may bear fruit in the future. If it does not, then you can cut it down.

(Ephesians 4, Psalm 122, Ezekiel 33, Luke 13)

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