Getting Ready to Pray
My mother was an unpaid fortune teller. She could read our palms and tell us about certain things which were going to happen very soon in our family—and they did! The different lines in our hands meant different things, and she had visions, it seemed to us, for each short and long line. Amazing! Some predictions came into our realities that very day, but some took a bit longer, two or three days.
It is astonishing how mothers know so much.
We can and do relate with the motherly God, who knows everything. We want to know even a little bit about the future—our futures. The question remains about whether or not we have personal freedom, or are we mere puppets. If the latter, then God would will that some be terrible sinners and others saints, and freedom has nothing to do with our lives and choices.
I just checked my palm to see if I had a clear and perfect vision of an answer for all this. We are preparing for our celebration of the weekend’s Eucharist. We extend our hands, just as we did as children, but now to receive the pledge of Christ’s being with us as we walk into our futures without having visions that boast clarity, but faith as a vision of the sacredness of the now-moments.
Faith takes practice. We can do that by extending our hands into the future and waiting to see what life-lines are written there. We prepare for celebrating the “Mystery of our Faith” by living within the mysteries of our lives.
Some Thoughts
The chapter from which our First Reading is taken began itself with the prophet Ezekiel being dropped down into a valley of dried bones. He breathes, or pronounces, over them and they rejoin into whole bodies. These bones are the whole House of Israel exiled from their homeland in Babylon.
What we hear in our reading is a follow-up prophesy.
God will be opening the graves and will call out those who have died. Again, this is directed toward the whole people in exile. God announces that God will do it all: bring them out and send them back to their homeland.
We have a long Gospel today with several important aspects. Here are a few reflection possibilities you may ponder about just what this whole story is about.
- The story is about death and resurrection.
- The story is how personal Jesus is with his love.
- The story is about Jesus’ calling us out of our personal tombs.
- The story concerns Jesus’ being the Light and the Life.
- The story is about the role of “signs” or “works” for the Jews to believe in Jesus.
These elements are spread all through this chapter from John’s Gospel. There was a man of blindness presented so Jesus could be “seen” and seen as the “one Who had been sent.” There was hunger and a lack of bread so that Jesus could be taken in or received interiorly. There was thirst so that Jesus could be revealed as “Living Water.” Here, there is death so that Jesus would bring “life” to this world.
We, the Church, and those about to enter the Church, are invited to believe in Jesus as the Savior, the one who is still sent, the embrace of God for our clayful humanity. Next Sunday is Passion Sunday, at the beginning of which there will be the recalling of the palms spread in welcome of Jesus into Jerusalem. If we are heading toward the celebration of his Resurrection two weeks from today, we are asked to reflect on our faith which invites us to and through our own Passion Sundays, Mondays and on. Following Jesus will always put us in conflict with the injustices, cruelties, invitations to walk other paths and take the Jerusalem bypass.
Whenever we are gathered together in a faith community, we are surrounded by faith-tested persons who also have gone out and beyond the tombs of their own temptations and sufferings. Jesus called Lazarus, the apostles, the man blinded, the adulterous woman, and the others, to believe not only in him, but in their own being sought out and sent out to live their beliefs.
With the Lord there is mercy and fullness of redemption.
(Ps. 130:1)
