From Our Pastors
What possible benefit could there be in the restrictions and the limitations the pandemic has imposed on all of us? What is the point of all this isolating?
We take some encouragement from the so called “hidden years” of Jesus’ life.
Reading the Gospel’s, as handed down to us, there is little to nothing about Jesus’ life after his birth and before he begins his public mission after his baptism in the Jordan. The only reference to those years is Luke 2:52: “And Jesus advanced [in] wisdom and age and favor before God and man." Those hidden years were vital to his development for they help him to discern his mission and to gather the resources to respond wisely and lovingly with his life.
So many natural processes have a preliminary time of maturation. Without a time of waiting the yeast will not ferment, and the bread will not rise. Without the winter hiatus the soil would not be enriched for spring. This time turns the popular adage “don’t just sit there do something” on its head. Now is the time to say: don’t just do something wait. Wait for the opportune time.
We celebrate the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11 today. Those days seemed, for many of us who endured them, to be the end of things, and prompted some to move away and seek new lives and possibilities. Many of us stayed put and waited, and eventually returned to the subways and to the streets and resumed our more regular lives.
Please God this time too will be a time of renewal. And the waiting will be productive. Our faith gives us reason to hope... Even Jesus rested in the tomb three days before the resurrection.
Here is an excerpt from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke on waiting with hope: “We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.... Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
Please keep in prayer all who lost their lives on 9/11/2001, and all who grieve their passing. Pray for a better, more just, and peaceful tomorrow, for all.
Fr. Mark Lane, C.O. and Fr. Michael Callaghan, C.O.
