I got the last roses wrapped up just before the snow this past week and put the wheelbarrow away in the shed. The gardener has this sense of going around and around through the cycles of planting, pruning, feeding, trimming back, wrapping up. And just as we're ending the garden year, there are signs of beginning again, with the seed catalogs arriving in the mail two weeks ago. We're finishing up and looking ahead.
And the liturgy reflects this as well. We are wrapping things up this Thirty-Third Sunday. Next week is the Feast of Christ the King and then we begin again with First Advent.
The beautiful and hopeful Psalm (16) at Mass today seems to be aware of this. One priest has titled it, "True Happiness: A Psalm of Confidence." This title suggests that religion isn't a thing simply to believe in, argue about, debate or prove for myself or others, but religion is supposed to be an experience - an experience to our happiness and confidence, as we move around and around our life-way.
Indeed, God is to be experienced. But often the way we approach religion precludes or obstructs any experience of God, or tricks us into thinking we experience God when really all we've experienced is our own talking and busy do-ing.
So, as we wrap up another liturgical year and have beginning again in our sights - we might ponder these things. Years ago there was a series of volumes reflecting on the themes of the liturgical year titled, The Year of Grace. And grace isn't some kind of commodity, a thing to be gotten and stored up. Grace is an experience of God's energizing presence, love, mercy and forgiveness - God's creative impulses shared with us. The Eastern Church speaks of grace as divine energies.
Have I had any personal experience of that this year? We come to Mass, week after faithful week, bringing with us all the "stuff" that makes up human living. Where has God been in all of that?
A woman I knew when I was a deacon back in 1979 sent a holiday card this week. She wasn't complaining or whining at all, but sharing an awareness of her increasing weakness, how her now grown sons are struggling with health and marital concerns. We could all write an end-of-the-year card reflecting on these kinds of human themes. How would I reflect God's presence and movement in a card like that?
Where was God in the losses suffered this years?
Where is God in the on-going struggles with health and aging?
Where has God inspired some new insight or opened up some new possibility for me?
Has God sought to teach me something new this year - about myself; about old or stuck thinking.
Has God been in my change of course or helped me to navigate the life-course I find myself on?
Has God provided for me when I feared I'd run dry?
In this awful time (and any time might be called awful, but this is the time we live in) how is God enabling me to stay standing?
Where is God and what is God doing and saying in the intersecting of my relationships?
This Thirty-Third Sunday we have our last look at the green for awhile. How is God greening me?
And these thoughts or reflections might help us to prepare a bit for Thursday's national feast day. We want to do more than plan a menu and spread a perfect table.
