Pascha VI

The Sixth Sunday of Easter 2020 – Cycle A Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; Psalm 66; 1 Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21

Life is full of arrivals and departures.

As a priest I walk in and out of many people’s lives.  You are connected with another person for just a brief time…in an ER or hospital room, at a gravesite, in Confession, as people pass by chatting as they leave Sunday Mass.  All encounters are at the behest of the parishioner or stranger and are relatively brief or at least for the length of a sickness, some counseling, some life situation or question.  And though a priest needs supportive relationships, I’ve realized that the everyday life of a priest is not the place to look for extended relationships.  We eventually move on to another assignment.  And though people are sincere about saying they will stay in touch; life, time and distance take their toll.  We are sowers of seed, no more, no less.  Jesus teaches that “whoever puts their hand to the plow but keeps looking back is unfit for the reign of God.” [Luke 9:26]

Does that mean, like many Catholics believe, that our, my life is lonely?  Hardly.  Do you consider that Jesus was lonely?  What it does mean though is that with all these arrivals and departures in the life of a priest that the priest needs to be anchored in something that is beyond and yet within.

And that is what Jesus, I believe, is trying to describe in what may seem confusing at times that last night at supper.

Jesus tells us that he would not be with us much longer.  That we cannot follow him, at least, not yet.  He says he’s going to prepare a dwelling place for us but isn’t very specific and that he will come back to take us with him.  He assures us that we know the way and when questioned by Thomas declares, he is the Way; giving no other road map.  Jesus says he is going to the Father and will ask the Father to send us another Advocate, the Spirit of truth.  This Spirit of truth will be in us thus Jesus’ promise will be fulfilled that he will not leave us orphans but will come to us.  He again stresses he is going away but will return.

A series of arrivals and departures – departures and arrivals.  And yet it is not the arrivals and departures that are important.  It is the in-between of departure and return, and isn’t that what this period of stay-at-home isolation is, that a person can find the space to resonate like a stringed instrument.  Presence and absence mingle.  Stillness and anxiety invite balance.  Arrivals and departures create a time for being.

In fact, the entire Christian life is lived in-between arrivals and departures.

Like a priest, we all move in and out of people’s lives.  God moves in and out of our lives.  It is the movement or rather dance, a dance begun by the Holy Trinity that is beyond and yet within us that the priest and every Christian must center on.

We prefer that which is definitive; what we can lay our hands on. But the in-between time of the Spirit of truth, this coming and going, the waiting and dancing of the Trinity, surprises like a good poem.  Stuffed into a pocket, the in-between time squirms out, oozes down our leg and gets stuck on the sole of our shoe.  You get home and start to peel it off and find half a dozen other things you picked up on the way.  The in-between times of the Spirit dresses up in gothic cathedrals and lies in the gutter on the bad side of town.  In-between times tease us in our dreams with its subversive agenda.

Life is full of arrivals and departures.  We priests know.  Become attentive and live the in-between. 

[Italicized imagery in the final paragraph is quoted from Loretta Ross, Letters from the Holy Ground]

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PLEASE NOTE: Homilies presented here are also being videotaped and put up on the Saint Mary, Oneonta website: http://www.SMCCOneonta.org.