Ever Ancient, Ever New
Each year the Church presents us with a cycle of readings to proclaim the Good News. If we are honest, however, its not an easy thing to preach from these same readings year after year. That is especially the case for those of you who may be in the same parish or even preaching to the same internet or television congregation. We are not all like Thomas Merton who in the last chapter of his famous autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, recounted the joy of going through the Church year and looked forward to repeating it, not just here on earth, but in the world to come.
The same must be said when one is preaching on prolife issues. Sometimes people will say, “Oh, not abortion again.” Or, “All that talk about mercy killing or euthanasia is overblown. Can’t Father find something else to talk about?” But there are a lot of good reasons why we have that cycle. And I would like to lay out seven.
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Nothing Will Ever Again Be the Same – Except That It Will
In his famous autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton ends with a chapter wholly devoted to the typical monk’s year. He goes through not just the daily round but the grand liturgical cycle of the Church’s calendar. He seemed to say now I am here in the Trappist monastery and things will always be according to this horarium and cycle.
Except it wasn’t.
He never fully adapted to the Rule and life and finally died a continent away while visiting Buddhist monks – an odd death for a man supposedly bound to a contemplative life.
Many odd things have happened in these last two years and forecasters – and ordinary people – are asking if things will ever be the same again. Work, medicine, roles of the state, economies – all have been upended. Will we ever just go back to the mythical ”before” time normality?
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The Promise of Hope
It is easy to talk about patience. It is much harder to be patient. The people of Israel had to wait hundreds of years for their promised Messiah. It seems ironic, and it must have been very difficult, that even when the promised Messiah came with the birth of our Lord in Bethlehem, the people needed to wait even more decades to be made aware of his presence.
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