The Mysterious Package: Homily for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C

Back around 1995 or 1996,
I was teaching my 8th grade class about vocations
and the different religious orders.
Their assignment was to research a particular religious order
and write a report to share with the class.
Now this was around 1996 B.G.
Before Google.
There was no Internet, no search engines, no Wikipedia, no email,
and so I had given them a magazine that listed addresses
for all the different religious orders in the United States.
They got into groups, chose a religious community,
did some encyclopedia research,
and then they wrote letters to these different communities
asking them for information.

We got all kinds of wonderful letters back.
Religious communities were excited
to share their stories with the students.
They sent brochures and even wrote letters by hand
to tell them about their daily lives.
We probably received a dozen or so letters from the different communities.
But one was different from the others.
Rather than a regular envelope,
this one was a big manila envelope and it was really thick,
like a package.
And it contained a wonderful surprise
that had a huge impact on my life,
and hopefully the lives of the students.
We’ll come back to this story,
and talk more about that package
in a moment.

But first, there’s a question at the heart of today’s gospel.
“Lord, will only a few people be saved?”
That’s the question that someone in the crowd asks Jesus,
But what they’re really asking is,
Will I be saved?

In other words, they’re asking
“Lord, is salvation for only a few select people,
or does someone like me have a chance?”

We worry about that, too, don’t we,
deep down inside?
Because no matter how faithful we try to be,
we just don’t know.

After all, we’re pretty good at fooling ourselves,
at rationalizing our decisions.

And the older we get,
the more we come to realize just how little we really do know.
I have a Family Circus cartoon
that I used to hang outside my 8th grade classroom door.
It shows little Billy talking to his Mom saying,
“I can’t wait ’til I’m in 8th grade and know everything there is to know.”

At that stage of life we do think we know everything.
And then life becomes more complex,
things don’t go as we thought they would,
and we begin to wonder and doubt.

One of the things we Christians wonder most about is
Am I doing what God wants me to do?
How can I tell?
Am I on the right path?

How many times have we started down one path,
thinking that this is what God wants me to do with my life,
only to realize God has something else in mind?

Our Catholic history is filled with the stories of saints
who started down one road,
only to realize God was calling them to something else.

We’re probably all familiar with that old Russian proverb,
“God writes straight with crooked lines.”

But even when we think we’ve figured out
what we’re supposed to do here on earth,
we still have our doubts.

It’s a condition of the Christian life
to wrestle with uncertainty and the unknown,
to try and make peace with the mystery.

Speaking of mystery,
we need to get back to that mysterious package
my students received.
I suppose if I really wanted to drive home the idea
that the Christian life involves uncertainty and the unknown,
I wouldn’t tell you what was in that package,
and you would just have to try and make peace with the mystery.
But I won’t do that.

The postmark on the manila envelope
told us it came all the way from Kentucky,
from a Trappist monastery called the Abbey of Gethsemane.
The envelope was thick,
much thicker than all the other envelopes we had received.
When we opened it up
we saw it was full of brochures and other papers,
but it also contained a special surprise:
there was a VHS video tape inside.
Remember this was B.G., Before Google.
It was also before YouTube and Netflix and Hulu.

The videotape contained a 50 minute documentary
about the life of Thomas Merton,
who had lived at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky.
At that time, neither I nor my students had ever heard of Thomas Merton,
and that videotape was our introduction
to one of the most important spiritual writers of our time.

He was mentioned by Pope Francis in his address to Congress
when he visited the United States in 2015,
where he called Merton a “source of spiritual inspiration
and a guide for many people…above all a man of prayer,…
a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace…”

Bishop Robert Barron,
who many of you know from his Catholicism TV series
and Word on Fire Ministries,
calls Merton one of the greatest spiritual writers
of the twentieth century,
and a man who had a “decisive influence”
on his vocation to the priesthood.

The life of Thomas Merton can tell us a lot
about wrestling with uncertainty,
and how God writes straight with crooked lines.
His most famous book is his spiritual autobiography,
The Seven Storey Mountain,
in which he tells about his conversion to Catholicism
and his vocation as a Trappist monk.
Bishop Barron describes it as
“essentially the tale of how a man fell in love with God.”
It’s the story of how Merton went from saying “I believe in nothing”
to believing so deeply in God,
that he discovered his vocation as a monk
and became of the Church’s greatest contemplatives.

He wrote The Seven Storey Mountain
at the same Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky,
which had sent us our package.
But inside the package was something else
besides brochures and a video tape.
It was this piece of paper, a prayer,
and at this time I’d like to invite the ushers
to hand out copies of the prayer to you all.

Thomas Merton wrote over 70 books,
and this beautiful prayer
comes from his book Thoughts in Solitude,
and can be very useful
when we begin to feel the weight of our complex life,
when we begin to doubt ourselves or wonder about our ultimate destiny.
It’s especially helpful to anyone who is in a transition period,
maybe facing retirement, or the last year of high school or college.
But it’s also helpful for each one of us
as we contemplate the words of Jesus in today’s gospel,
and we begin to wonder ourselves,
Will I be saved?

The prayer demonstrates how honest we can be before God,
how we don’t need to hide our uncertainty from him.
It also shows a deep trust in God’s care for us.

As I read it aloud to you, I invite you to read it silently to yourself,
and make the prayer your own:

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following 
your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this,
you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Amen.

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