Feast of St. Luke, Evangelist

The formation program for Jesuit novices includes what they call A Pilgrimage Experience.  A novice is brought to a remote location with a bare minimum of provisions in a backpack and is expected to make his way back to the home novitiate in fifteen days.  He has to depend solely on the help and kindness that people are willing to give him on the way.  He is stripped down to bare essentials and left to face-to-face encounters with people and environments in a way which leaves him very vulnerable.  The whole point is to learn and experience in a raw way the trust which binds him to God.

I think this Experience uncovers and exposes the deep thread at the heart of our own lives.  The history of our trust and mistrust has shaped basic responses to life, others, God, and ourselves.  We learned trust from the moment we were born and received into a family of love and support.  Trust can never be forced or programmed.  It is a freely given response of opening our lives to the acceptance, attention, and intervention of another.  We place our lives in their hands, vulnerable to love or betrayal.  How they respond is crucial to our own self-understanding. We are not the same afterwards.  The story of our lives is a history of trust and mistrust.  Trust has created connections and communion that would be unknown to a life which armored itself with a need to be sure.

Luke has given us a Gospel which breathes the spirit of trust.  Jesus sends out his disciples, stripped of all securities and left to depend on the hospitality with which they are received.  They had to go out in trust.  Jesus sent them as lambs among wolves, into incomprehension and maybe even hostility.  There is no guarantee of success.  There is an almost holy indifference to results, totally centered on the new life which is being offered and not on the messengers.  The messengers are to be disarmed, detached, and dependent, sharing the vulnerability of the word they preach.  The medium is the message. This is the Word, Luke tells us, that made itself vulnerable (lying in a manger) and entered the world disarmed, dependent, and trusting in the welcome and hospitality he received.

The Father entrusts his Word to us in this Eucharist, and we are called to welcome Him at this table, to offer Him hospitality.  Through him, we can entrust ourselves to the Father and let ourselves become vulnerable to his love.  Luke’s focus on hospitality extends beyond table fellowship to God’s hospitality towards us and our hospitality towards God.  Our very prayer is first of all an expression of trust.  Peace and forgiveness are the work of the Spirit in realizing that communion we have together in humanity and the Body of Christ.  Peace to this household.  Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to those on whom his favor rests (Lk 2:14). The Kingdom is at hand.