Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Every once in a while, we see a person transformed and come to life in a changed situation.  They had been plodding along in a routine and anonymous way, when suddenly they were put in a new job or position and latent talents emerged.  They were a new and different person.  They found themselves.  Sometimes it takes a crisis or an encounter with a person to bring potentialities to life and light.

In less dramatic ways, an event or word can suddenly help us come to life.  We are pulled out of the shell we had constructed around us and confronted with a whole new experience of reality.  We are fully human and fully alive (to quote the title of a 1976 book by Fr. John Powell).  It may be an almost mystical moment of being touched and overwhelmed by a reality which cannot be put into words.  We have moments when the ordinariness of life is broken through and we are witnesses of an order which is transcendent and even holy.  A new mode of being is revealed to us, a new sense of belonging, safety, and identity.  One moment seems to contain all moments.  No one seems to have bettered Rudolph Otto’s description of the holy as both fascinating and frightening.  We need to hear Do not fear in the face of this reality.  These are not only A-HA moments of discovery and breakthrough, but also OH-NO moments of plunging into the dark depths of emptiness and poverty.  Put out into the deep waters is itself a risk.

These moments are both challenging and transient, and can thus quickly be dismissed and discounted.  They seem less real than the hard facts of daily life and their reliable demands.  If we can’t put it into words, it loses value as manageable currency.  We have labored all night long and caught nothing. The logic of the normal provides sufficient safety, identity, and belonging. Do Not Disturb.  But the moments are disturbing and begin to have their effect when we question (or let ourselves be questioned) the inevitability of the patterns and habits that have enclosed our lives.  The moment of insight or conversion may be transient, but the call to conversion and transformation continues to seep through the ways we see and act in the world.  We have become aliens and strangers, seeing life differently and ready to drop what we were doing in response and obedience to the new vision.  They left everything and followed him.

The narratives we hear in today’s readings have the potential to bring us to life, to recognize, accept and integrate (to be amazed) the awesome force of the spirit speaking in our hearts. These narratives are revelations of the working of the Spirit who works in the same way in our lives. The Vatican Council has alerted us to the once submerged revelation that all Christians are called to holiness.  Not just being pious or good-natured, but instruments of the very holiness of God.  God has sent his spirit into the hearts of the faithful to move them interiorly to love God with all their strength and minds and will and to love one another as Christ has loved them. This will be disturbing and even risky.  Put out into the deep.  Leave everything to follow him.  Do we dare to suspect that he might be speaking to us, bringing us to real life, fully alive and fully human?  Of course, we don’t have to. We have been working all night and have caught nothing. Period.

In a circular letter from our Abbot General, Dom Bernardus Peters, he reminds us that our vocation of unceasing prayer is meant to keep the world open to God. Not a simple call in a world which turns its back on God.  Isaiah is an apt figure to represent the silence which empties our hearts from all forms of self-assertion and makes us ready and willing missionaries of the Word.  Peter and the disciples are models of the renunciation and simplicity that free us to leave all that is not necessary to join ourselves to the Lord.  And Paul is that great missionary recreated in the solidarity of sharing the mystery of Christ as it had been handed down to him.  We are also called by the Spirit of holiness to keep the world open to God in silence, simplicity, and solidarity.  May it—and we—come to life.