It was a normal rush-hour day in a New York City airport. Commuters raced down concourses to make quick connections between major incoming flights and local helicopters or business jets that would take them from one small airport to another in time for supper. Men in heavy coats swinging heavy briefcases and women in high heels loaded down with cumbersome shoulder bags skidded around vendors and carts, corners, and counters in a mad rush to reach gates where the doors were already closing. They pushed and jostled, bumped, and pounded their way through a jumble of people dashing down the same corridor but in the opposite direction.
Suddenly, everybody heard the crash. The fruit stand teetered for a moment and then tilted the fruit baskets off the countertop to the floor. Apples and oranges rolled helter-skelter up and down the concourse. Then the girl behind the counter burst into tears, fell to her knees, and then began to sweep her hands across the floor, searching for the fruit. “What am I going to do?” she cried. It’s all ruined. It’s all bruised. I can’t sell this. One man, seeing her distress as he ran by, stopped, and came back. He got down on the floor with the girl and began putting fruit back in the basket. As he watched her sweep the space with her hands, he realized that she was blind. The man took forty dollars and put it in her hands. “Here is forty dollars to pay for the damage we’ve done.” The girl straightened up, she began to grope the air, looking for him now. “Mister,” she called, “Mister, wait ….” He paused and turned to look back into those blind eyes. “Mister,” she said, “are you Jesus?”
We come to the Sunday liturgy, week after week, many of us all our lives. The question must be: So what? What has happened to us? “What have we become?”” Who are we on all the rest of the days of the week?”
Jesus became human to demonstrate there is not a way out of suffering, but a way over it. The way over trouble is to know that our Father wants only our good; not pain but joy; not illness, but wholeness; not anguish but peace.
When I heal the other, I heal something in myself as well. We must become healers who understand pain and take the wounded we meet and know into our hearts, listen to the pain of others, enable them to talk, allow them to cry.
“Are you Jesus?” People ask us silently every day. And the answer, if we live it with constancy, with regularity, with fidelity, is surely, yes.
God bless! Have a wonderful week!
By the way – did you know that you can continue to be a good steward even when your earthly life has ended? Please consider remembering St. Theodore’s Parish in your will. It will help us keep our ministries vital and to serve more people. Many thanks!