That our joy may be complete

In a recent edition of America (subscription required), Kathleen Norris has an Easter reflection titled "Something Wondrous is Afoot."  As we begin this Easter season, she provides rich food for prayerful reflection.  Her insights are also relevant, I think, to the MOJ discussion of abuse.  And, her Here is a sample:

 

On the way to becoming Christian, we are all learners. When it comes to fully accepting what it means to be a Christian, I am not a particularly good student. For one thing, my prayer life is much too haphazard for a Benedictine oblate. If I am fortunate enough to be visiting a monastery, going to the Liturgy of the Hours every day, I do fine; but left to my own devices I falter.

…

The writers of the early church are generally of more use to me than modern theologians when I am trying to make theological concepts come alive. John Chrysostom, for example, packs his dogma into plain speech and concrete imagery. A human voice comes through. The homily he preached in Constantinople before being forced into an exile from which he would never return is fortified with biblical allusion and still heart-rending more than 1,600 years later: “Christ is with me, whom shall I fear? Though waves rise up against me, the seas, the wrath of rulers: These things are no more to me than a cobweb.” He encourages the congregation not to lose hope because: “Where I am, there also are you; where you are, there too am I; we are one body.... We are separated by space, but we are united by love. Not even death can cut us apart. For even if my body dies, my soul will live on and will remember my people.”

To me, this is Easter truth speaking through ordinary language. To someone else, it might seem the ravings of a fool. For we are always free to choose what meaning to give to the events that shape us, to opt for fear or hope, despair or joy, bitterness or love.

Two men I knew both received a dire prognosis, one of liver cancer, the other of stage IV melanoma. The man with liver cancer, a tavern owner and petty criminal, survived much longer than anyone expected; he had several years of remission. He told me that on his worst days in the hospital he promised himself that if he ever got out again, he would devote himself to “looking out for number one.” And that is exactly what he did; living selfishly and self-indulgently until the day he died, alone and mostly unlamented.

The other man was a Benedictine monk who died just three months after his initial diagnosis. “I realized,” he wrote to friends, “that everything I’ve experienced since my original bout with melanoma 20 years ago has been a grace...not a bad realization for a monk. I have never felt so surrounded by love. This is the most grace-filled time in my life, an unending source of hope and well-being at the core of my being—pure gift.” In thanking the many who had been praying for him, he wrote: “Thanks for helping me to choose life in this time of fear and uncertainty. Something wondrous is afoot. I just can’t see it yet.”

A man named Paul, facing execution, once wrote from a jail cell: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice” (Phil 4:4). A man named Jesus, on the night before he died, ate his last meal with friends, talked up a storm and no doubt startled the company by proclaiming, “I am saying these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (Jn 15:11). Wondrous things afoot: an inexpressible but ever-present love, a joy so profound that even death cannot diminish it. Happy Easter!