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World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
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Anyone who has ever tried to start exercising again after months or years of neglect knows this. The first day you say, “Tomorrow I will start.” Tomorrow comes, and suddenly your body invents fifty reasons why today is not the day. The strange thing is that the longer we stay stuck, the more normal the ‘stuckness’ begins to feel. There is a man lying near the pool in Jerusalem. Thirty-eight years. Just think about that. Some of you here have not been alive that long. Thirty-eight years. That's longer than most marriages. Longer than most careers. Imagine you've been sick for thirty-eight years. Not with a cold. Not with a bad back, not even a fractured hand. And every single day, you drag yourself to a pool and you wait. And wait. And wait some more. Thirty-eight years is long enough for a person’s entire identity to become wrapped around a single sentence: “This is just how my life is.”
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Imagine, for a moment, that you are the royal official in Cana. You aren’t just a character in a story; you are a man whose world is collapsing. Your son is dying. You have likely spent a fortune on the best doctors the Roman world could offer, yet here you are, desperate enough to chase a rumor about a carpenter-turned-healer. The royal official in John’s Gospel was, by any measure, a powerful man. He had rank. He had influence. His name opened doors. Yet none of it could save his son. So he walked. Uphill. In the Galilean heat. From Capernaum to Cana, roughly twenty to twenty-five miles. In our world, that’s a short drive with a good playlist. But in the ancient world, it meant eight or ten hours of dust, heat, and anxious silence.
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Once in a workshop for principals of schools in which I was part of, I heard A retired school principal share a story that has stayed with me for long. After forty years in education, he said the most difficult meeting he ever attended was not with troubled students, it was with teachers discussing their former students. Whenever someone famous appeared in the news, a scientist, an artist, a politician, teachers who had taught them years earlier would say things like, “Really? That boy? He sat in the back of my class.” Or, “That girl? she barely spoke when she was in class.” They remembered the old version of the person and struggled to reconcile it with who that person had become. The principal said something interesting: “We often freeze people in the version of them we first knew.”
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In 1980, a retired NYPD detective, Frank Bolz pioneered something that transformed law enforcement forever, especially hostage negotiation. His radical, counterintuitive insight was breathtakingly simple: he said, don't storm the building. Talk first. Because the moment genuine conversation begins, something irreversible happens. When you talk, a relationship is established. The standoff becomes a relationship. And relationships, real ones, change people. God, it turns out, invented this long before Frank. What Isaiah records in the first reading is a divine hostage negotiation situation. And here's the twist; we are simultaneously the hostage and the hostage-taker. We have taken ourselves captive, barricaded inside our own comfortable habits, our carefully curated religion, our elaborate self-justifications. And God, rather than sending in the SWAT team, simply picks up the phone. "Come now. Let us talk this over." He doesn't kick the door in. He calls. He begins a conversation and that distinction is everything.
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In the marketplaces of Galilee, grain was not sold in tidy, sealed bags or neat plastic packages, like what we have in the supermarkets, but they were scooped from large baskets into whatever container you brought from home. A standard measure, usually, smaller household bowl was used to fill your bags before your eyes. But how it was filled made all the difference. A stingy merchant would pour the grain in loosely and stop when it looked full. Air pockets remained. Space was wasted. It appeared full and generous, but it was not. An honest seller, however, would press the grain down firmly with his hands. He would lift and shake the container so the kernels settled into every hidden gap. Then he would pour more on top until it formed a small mound above the rim, threatening to spill into your cloak. You went home knowing you had received more than expected.
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I want to share a story that has been circulating lately, a story of an Uber driver named Marcus and a passenger named Mr. Patterson. One evening Marcus picked up an elderly man at 11 PM who handed him five addresses and said, "Drive me to these places. Don't ask why until we're done." First stop: a house in the suburbs. The old man sat in the car, staring at it, crying silently. "This is where I grew up. Okay. Let us go to the Next stop." Second stop: an empty elementary school. He got out, walked to the playground, and sat on a swing for twenty minutes. "I taught here. 43 years. Best job I ever had." Third stop: a diner. He went in, ordered coffee, but he didn't drink it. Just sat. Looking around. "My wife and I had our first date here. 1967."
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