It's consoling
to know that no matter how firmly we lock our doors, Jesus can still
break in upon our privacy, bringing with him the radiance of a divine
world we've long forgotten. There was a time, of course, when our
doors and windows seemed to be wide open, our senses of sight, hearing,
touch, imagination especially sharp to pick up the traces of God's
Spirit all around us, be it in a rose arbor or blue jay or the sound
and scent of a seascape. Or as Wordsworth put it: "There was
a time when meadow, grove and stream, / The earth, and every common
sight, / To me did seem / Appareled in celestial light."
But driven by
some radical anxiety, similar to that of the disciples in today's
Gospel, we learned early to bridle our senses, to detect only the
ominous instead of the wonderful in our environment. We learned
to think survival, to lock our doors, shutter our windows - to dwell
within a world of business gray or "homeland security".
Still, even as
we grow older, Christ can intrude upon us as he did upon those terrified
disciples. Now and again, by way of little incidents, he can appear
among us to remind us that there's so much more to reality than
our doubting minds will allow - as he did with Anne Porter, who
tells of a wartime Sunday morning walk in 1940's Manhattan with
the littlest of her sons. First Avenue was empty and gray. No one
was up. The bridges over the East River stood silent "like
great webs of stillness". Returning home past locked-up shops,
she paused to contemplate a shop window heaped with old lamps, guitars,
radios, dusty furs - "And there among them a pawned christening
dress / White as a waterfall."
That's how simply
Christ and the real world he represents can break in upon us - so
that suddenly we realize how much we have let death or terrorism
constrict our minds, and find ourselves longing to inhabit the world
Christ inhabits; to explore with him the peaceful "here and
now" that lies all around us beyond our muted senses.
Proust writes often
of such moments when, for instance, the taste of a particular French
pastry dipped in tea would lift his hero Marcel out of the boredom
of Parisian social life to sense again the sacramental quality of
his childhood village of Combray - where the sight of a simple hawthorn
bush used to flood him with affection and the names of village streets
like Rue Saint-Jacques, Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, Rue du Saint-Esprit
made him feel he dwelt in nothing less than a suburb of God's celestial
Jerusalem.
And then there
was the spire of the village church of St. Hilaire. From wherever
young Marcel viewed the town and countryside that spire always looked
as if it were the very Finger of God tenderly touching the earth.
Indeed, so profoundly did he remember it that, later in life, were
he to find himself in a strange quarter of Paris and to ask directions
of a passerby to an intended destination and were the passerby to
point out a distant spire as the place to turn, Marcel would stand
motionless, oblivious of his original destination, remembering that
spire of his childhood. Then, only after a seemingly interminable
moment, would the passerby see him begin to walk a bit unsteadily
toward his original destination - but as Marcel himself comments,
"The goal I now sought was in my heart."
Moments of divine
intrusion! Moments when Christ and the fullness of life he represents
break in upon us as in today's Gospel! Stay alert! Their frequency
may be only dependent upon how often you'd like them to happen.
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