2nd Sunday Year B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2021

“‘Come and see’, replied Jesus. So they went, and saw, and stayed with him the rest of that day”. We can do even better than that, better than simply “stay with him”, now that he has died and been raised by his Father. According to his invitation to the disciples at their Last Supper together, we can stay, or dwell, “in” him; or, if we prefer, he will stay, or dwell, “in” us.

No wonder that the dynamic Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, once wrote, “We have no need of wings to go in search of him. We have only to find a quiet place where we can be alone … and gaze upon him present within us.”

When we first try to get to know someone, we need to talk. I gather that some teen-agers virtually live on their iPhones. Building up and deepening a friendship can take a fair amount of talking. A male mystic, the author of a well-known book on prayer, “The Cloud of Unknowing”, a century or two before Teresa of Avila, wrote of intimacy, friendship, in these terms: “All that I am, just as I am, offered to [shared with] all that you are, just as you are”. As trust grows both ways, that calls for a fair amount of self-revelation, and an equal amount of respectful listening. Both take words — though not only words; and both take time. The disciples “stayed with Jesus the rest of that day,” hoping that they would grow in friendship, and get to know each other. They stayed well beyond “the rest of that day”. They stayed with him until his death, but their mutual intimacy really took off in the years after his death … as they continued to “remain in him and he in them”; and they learnt to share in depth.

While teen-agers talk their heads off in their desire to get to know each other better, couples who have been together for decades learn to talk less and less. They communicate best in silence.

How is it with us and God? the God who is Father, Son and Spirit? the God who continually creates us? the God whose essence is love, and whose creative energy, constantly sustaining us, is necessarily love — and only love, and cannot be anything else? Our very existence is the direct result of God’s constantly loving us. God is with us. God is within us — and we are within God —
every moment of every day, even when we are sound asleep. Most of the time, we are totally unaware of God. That’s OK. God is used to that.

Praying is our effort to engage with God — as Teresa put it, “to gaze on him, present within us”, to connect. Yet God as God is totally beyond our comprehension. At least with the risen Jesus, we can use our imaginations — and we do know what it is like to be humans; and we do have the Gospels that tell us something of his life. We’ll get distracted. Of course, we’ll get distracted. The only way not to get distracted is not to pray. But God does not get distracted, and God is patient. As with an elderly couple still in love, God can be present in a felt sense of emptiness; and God can even communicate through silence.

That may sound confusingly cryptic. Talk to someone on the journey. If you like, talk to me.