“He was made
known to them in the breaking of the bread."
Life is a journey.
That
is a frequently used metaphor but today it takes on a special meaning
in the light of our Gospel passage from Luke. Here we meet two
companions, disciples of Jesus, traveling on a road that leads from
despair to joy and where bitter resentment is transformed into hope and
joyous gratitude.
Today we will see that
the liturgy of the Eucharist that we celebrate is also such a journey.
Henri Nouwen has written a superb meditation on this Gospel called,
“With Burning Hearts”, connecting it with the liturgy of the Eucharist
and in turn connecting it to the life journey each and everyone of us
is invited by God to pursue.
He tells us
that this journey has five stages: loss, presence, invitation,
communion, and mission.
In this homily, I
want to touch on some of these stages and how they do apply to real
life.
The first stage involves coming to
grips with our losses.
We are from time to
time aware that we have suffered a loss in the course of our life, some
of these are small like an imperfect hairdo that we are forced to live
with, loss of an opportunity to score a goal, the loss of the security
of youth.
Some are large like loosing your
hair and thus your youth, loss of marital excitement, loss of a loved
one, loss of health.
The biggest losses
are those where we sense that we have lost our dreams, or where our
expectations of the good life have been dashed and we have to settle
for mediocrity, or worse where we have lost the conviction that our
life has meaning. But before we come to the dark point where our losses
feel that big, we have to find a way to deal with and heal our many
ordinary losses.
We do that not by passive
acceptance but by an activity that we can call mourning our losses.
This means giving our losses some expression.
In the Emmaus journey, the companions did this by talking about them;
in the liturgy we do it at the very beginning by our expression, Lord
have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. We need to do this
mourning in our life also because eventually we will be faced with a
choice - do we let our life deteriorate into one of resentment or do we
cultivate a sense of gratitude for this gift we call life?
Resentment is a hard thing.
It is a
soul killer because it is a cold anger that settles into the center of
our being and hardens our hearts. Choosing gratitude as the liturgy
directs us to do is soul healing and leads us to view life as a real
gift, not a thing to be grasped but a gift to be received in gratitude
no matter what is going on around or within us.
In
the end, it becomes clear that we have to mourn our losses so that we
can get beyond them and avoid the trap of resentment but in order to do
this, we need some intuition that in doing so we will find new life.
To illustrate this I offer a familiar Easter
story.
It was obvious that eight year old
Stephen’s disease with its attendant mental disability was becoming
even more severe. His Sunday school teacher did her best to include
Stephen in the classroom activities and to avoid situations which might
prompt his classmates to make fun of him.
Around Easter she gave each of the 8
children in the class an empty plastic egg and instructed them to place
inside it an object that represented new life in spring.
Fearing that Stephen might not have caught on, and not wanting
to embarrass him, the teacher had the children place all the eggs on
the desk so that she could open them.
The first had a tiny flower in it.
“What a
lovely sign of new life,” said the
teacher. One of the students couldn’t help but erupt, “I brought that
one!"
Next came a rock. The teacher assumed
this must be Stephen’s since rocks don’t symbolize new life.
But Billy shouted that his rock had moss on
it, and moss represented new life.
“Very
good, Billy,” agreed the teacher.
A butterfly flew from the third container and
another child bragged that her choice was the best of all.
The 4th container was empty.
This must be Stephen’s, thought the teacher quickly reaching for
a different one.
“Teacher, please don’t
skip mine,” interrupted Stephen.
“But its
empty, Stephen,” said the teacher gently.
“That’s
right,” said Stephen.
“The tomb was empty
and that represents new life for everyone."
Later that summer Stephen’s condition
worsened and he died.
At his funeral on
his casket, eight plastic eggs, all of them empty, greeted the mourners.
Stephen by his example taught his
schoolmates and his teacher that there is a bigger story that the one
they focus on in their everyday journey. He teaches us that to as did
Jesus to those companions on the road. While they were mourning their
losses, he shocked them by saying: You foolish people - you have been
complaining about your losses not realizing that they are there to
enable you to receive the gift of life! And he proceeded to show them
the bigger story by opening God’s word to them.
This active presence of the Word is
offered to us for the same reason in the liturgy - to put the little
stories of our losses into the context of the big story that is from
God and with God.
We are accustomed to
words that just give us information; but when God speaks his word to
us, it is not about giving new information.
The
disciple’s hearts didn’t burn because they received new insight, but
because the Word that was spoken to them is the sacramental Word, a
Word that makes present what it signifies.
Only
when we take the Word to heart, can we sense that it points the way to
new life. In this way, the Word that creates us is also the Word that
heals us.
When we take the Word to heart, we are
ready for the next stage. As on the road to Emmaus, we are moved to
invite the Word, Jesus, into our dwelling place. We say to Jesus - I
have heard you; my heart is changing... please come into my home and
see where and how I live.
The invitation
is crucial because if we don’t make it, the Word will move on, pass us
by as do most of the words we hear. In the liturgy we make this
invitation in the Creed - our profession of faith and trust in our one
God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the Catholic Church, the
communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the
body, and life everlasting. In doing this act of trust, we are opening
ourselves up to receive God who wants to become one with us.
This is what communion is.
In the Emmaus event, the two companions
thought they were inviting a stranger to their table; but that table
had actually been transformed into the Lord’s table so that they could
receive him in the bread. At that holy moment the stranger disappeared
and Jesus became one with them, present as body, blood, soul and
divinity of the reality of Jesus.
Thus the
lesson of the Liturgy presented in this way is that if we choose the
path to new life, we banish from our being our losses and the
resentment that comes from them, and replace them with the living
presence of God. We can then choose to live a life of gratitude.
That brings us to mission. Our
gratitude compels us to share this story with others.
That becomes our mission - by our lives and if necessary by our
words, we are to tell our story in the context of the fullness of God’s
story - however we are called to it.
Yes, life is a journey and through this simple
reflection we can see that the liturgy of the Eucharist sets a pattern
for us to follow on the journey if we want to progress to new life!