Father Adam Booth, C.S.C., Faculty Fellow in Theology at Stonehill College: "God grants Moses a great gift, but a partial one only. God takes Moses up a mountain and shows him the entirety of the Promised Land. And that’s an amazing gift: the intimacy with God it involved; the beauty of the view, I’m sure; and the fact that it represented a pledge that God makes good on promises. God’s People would have their own land, just as was promised them. But it was partial..."
Firstly, because Moses knew he would never step foot in that land. But, also, because, as wonderful a gift as the Land was, it’s a gift that was frail and fragile, and that was lost at numerous times throughout Israel’s history. It’s a gift that strains toward a greater gift still, the fullness of God’s promise to take us home, that is fulfilled only in heaven, in the gift of eternal life.
Dr. King connected Moses’ experience to the simultaneous hope and longing that he felt regard racial justice in America when he said that he had “been to the mountaintop.” God let him see something worth hoping for, even though he knew he wouldn’t be able to walk into it, not during his earthly lifetime.
We too feel simultaneous hope and longing, and we need to keep both alive: our gratitude and awe that we are granted vision of the promise of eternal life; and longing and hunger for its fulfillment as we sojourn in this vale of tears.
One place we see that vision of the world to come is in the life of the saints. Today’s saint, St. Clare, shows us what a heavenly life looks like in her evangelical poverty (placing God before all things), and in her formation of communities of sisters who seek to live out and show to the world a mutual communion with one another reflective of the relationships God seeks. St. Clare is the patron saint of television because, once when she was ill, God granted her a mystical vision of the Mass that was being celebrated in the nearest chapel. I think of all you watching this Mass remotely, through technological rather than miraculous means, but the effect is the same: God didn’t let illness keep St. Clare from hearing and seeing Mass, and God doesn’t let illness keep you from that vision either.
For in this place, at this altar, we are granted the most wonderful vision of the Promise available: a bounteous feast; Christ crucified for our salvation.
Father Adam Booth, C.S.C.
