How do you have a victory banquet
when everyone is invited?
It’s a victory because everyone is invited.
No one is left out.
--Fr. Patrick Michael,
Homily, December 6, 2023
(Funeral Mass for Mary Cosgrave)
What is it we have to celebrate?
The people of Israel saw a victory over their enemies as something to celebrate. When they could see their enemies – who had threatened their way of life, threatened their peace, threatened their way of being – crushed, they were grateful to their God for having crushed them.
When Isaiah says that the web that is woven over all people, the veil that veils all people, would be removed, and then he says, He will destroy death forever, I’m not sure death is the veil. Fear of death is the veil. Fear is what keeps us from seeing the Lord’s hand at work in our everyday life, because it sends our focus somewhere else when we worry and we fret and we are disturbed by many things…
We may have lots of things to be worried about, lots of things to fret about. If you get the New York Times notifications on your phone, you will be sent all sorts of reasons to worry twenty or twenty-five times during the day. It’s not the handiest service from that standpoint, and you could focus on what the New York Times is concerned about, or you could focus here, on what you’re living, on what God is doing right now, what God is unfolding in our lives that will help remove the veil, help destroy the web that hangs over us, that blinds us.
We gather here to celebrate at a Eucharistic banquet. It foreshadows the banquet of eternity when we are one with him. Perhaps we just have to learn how to not use the veil or the web, but to see past it, and to find everything there is to celebrate in a day for what God is doing for us.
--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, December 4, 2024
Image source: Studio Tomás Saraeno (Berlin), spider web (one of the artist’s main sources of inspiration), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/t-magazine/tomas-saraceno-spiders-shed.html
No comments:
Post a Comment