Homily for Oblate 20th Anniversary Liturgy
by Jody Crowley Beers
It is good to be here.
To quote eecummings: “I THANK YOU GOD FOR MOST THIS AMAZING DAY”
And it is AMAZING: 20 years since this particular oblate community began, since the Spirit moved the sisters and all of us onto a path that brought us to here and now
they invited us into their space/rule/spirituality/community/lives/values/prayer
& I don’t think anyone imagined what we would become
This very special anniversary and today’s readings have2 themes running through them:
Spirit: the Spirit of God that permeates and creates the world;
& Community — which helps us to encounter the Spirit —
Using them, This is a time to remember THE PAST
to embrace THE PRESENT
to trust THE FUTURE so we may evolve into it
I want to begin with a little story about myself. It’s not really a story, just a moment in time. I’m sharing it for 2 reasons: first, it’s a memory that this anniversary and today’s reading evoked in me, and I’ll tell you the second reason in a minute.
When I was 20 years old, I was going to college at Mundelein, In Chicago, right on Lake Michigan. One evening I stood on the shore, looking at the lake, struggling as do many 20 year olds, with what to do with my life: what major, what job, what profession? As a sophomore I had already switched my major from drama to pre-med so you can see my uncertainty. I thought I could do whatever I wanted, but couldn’t discover what that was. As I thought about this dilemma, an old, old sister was walking
slowly along the sea wall. As I watched her, the certainty came to me suddenly, dramatically: that woman was walking with God! I knew with equally sudden certainty, that was what I wanted to do with my life: to spend it walking with God. I soon found a community of people who could help me do that and was with them for 44 years.
The second reason I told you that story is that I know that most of you have had similar experiences, when you knew with a certainty deeper than thought, a sudden knowing that came from deep inside, that you had a call to a relationship with God, and in community. It may have come during an encounter with the Sisters, during a retreat, while talking with an oblate, or from any life changing event. The Spirit comes to us in many ways when we are listening.
How do the readings remind us of Spirit & Community?
SPIRIT within us & among us
Benedict’s prologue invites us to ask for God’s grace [divine assistance] [God’s life} “for those things that we find hardly possible”
The author of Ephesians prays… that you may be strengthened
in your inner being with power through the Spirit “Glory be to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we dare ask or imagine. For both Benedict and the author of Ephesians,
That grace, that power IS the Spirit working within us
They both want us to be overwhelmed with God’s presence & power in us and in our world
Jesus is even more radical in John’s gospel when he prays that we may be one EVEN AS JESUS & GOD ARE ONE. “I in them & you in me, that they [we as well as the disciples] that they may become perfectly one,
“… that the love with which you have loved me may be in them & I in them.”
That’s about as intimate as you can get. We are being invited to
recognize, to feel, to count on that Power in us now
that can do more than we dare ask or imagine
COMMUNITY: all 3 readings specifically call us to community) Benedict is establishing a school for God’s service. It’s
significant this happened after he had spent years in solitude deepening his presence to the God who was always present to him. Monks saw the Spirit in him, & asked him to be their abbot…. which led to many monasteries, including the one his sister founded.
Jesus is speaking to the community of his followers & to those who
will come after them, to us. It seems to be in community that the Spirit’s power & love can become something beyond our imagining
These readings call us to participate in creating a world
where God’s love is visible, what Jesus called THE KINDOM. Jesus’
enterprise was God’s reign, & he shares that enterprise with us.
We can go back further, to find God’s Spirit emerging, creating our reality
Teilhard would take us back to the Big Bang
Teilhard wanted us to trust in God’s work within us. He tells us to “Trust in the Slow Work of God”, when we’re creating something— like our own lives, or our own oblate community. He calls out our natural impatience to reach the end without delay, to skip the intermediate stages.
He reminds us that … all progress is made by passing through some stages of instability.
so if our oblate community (or our own life) now and then seems
to have some instability….that’s how progress happens
Richard Rohr helps us “get” this message. His new book, The Universal Christ, talks about the confusion some of us have with “Jesus” and “Christ.” (…understanding this will help us to understand ourselves)
For Rohr, “Christ is a universal and deeper reality at the heart of all things.” We use other names for that, don’t we?
Creator, Holy Spirit, Wisdom, Love, God,…. a universal reality at the heart of all things God permeating creation as it is becoming
To help us understand this, Rohr identifies the difference between “here”
and “the depths of here.” You are here physically, sitting on your chair; we can all see you and hear you and touch you. But you know there is a deeper reality inside, beneath your descriptive self, where you go within. The deeper self, the true self that flows from our source, our ground of being.
Rohr suggests that Jesus is the “here”, the bodily human being who travelled and healed and spoke to others, and was crucified.
Christ is, then, “the depths of here,” the Spirit who permeated Jesus’ being and could do great things in Him and with Him. Jesus learned how to be in the depths of here and he showed us how. Finding the depths of here in myself helps me to find it in other people, helps US to find it in our community.
In Jesus, God overcomes the gap between human and divine, Rohr goes so far as to say “You are like Christ, an incarnation of Spirit and Matter operating as one.
Teilhard wrote, “Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. & within you means: you personally, you the oblate
community, the you that is all of us and our world
Give [God] the benefit of believing that the Spirit is leading you, forming you, transforming you; and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”
Trust in the slow work of God … whose power working in us can do more than we dare ask or imagine
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