HOMILY EASTER SEASON WEEK 05 03 – Yr II

Abiding in Jesus and Bearing Fruit

(Acts 15:1-6; Ps 122; Jn 15:1-8)

****************************************

In the Domano Retreat center in the Diocese of Prince George, there is a vine covering most of a wall that both clings to and reaches out. That vine is a metaphor for today’s readings and message they hold out to us.

We are to both cling to and reach out; pray and love; abide in Jesus and bear much fruit.

Abiding in Jesus involves prayer. The Church breathes with two lungs – devotional prayer, such as the rosary, and the public prayer of Jesus Christ, or the Eucharist.

While discursive prayer (prayer that we recite) has its value, I suspect the kind of prayer Jesus has in mind when he speaks of “abiding in him” is the prayer of contemplation he himself practiced communing with the Father. According to Fr. Thomas Keating, contemplation is a very mature way of praying. It involves listening to God’s word, meditating on it, praying with it and finally, just resting in God’s presence, trusting that God is doing whatever God wants to do deep within us. Keating reminds us God’s first language is silence.

Elijah in his cave in 1 Kings 19:11-13 experienced God in the “sheer silence” of this kind of prayer, and not in the hurricane, earthquake or fire. Mary of Bethany is another biblical model for the prayer of contemplation. She was sitting at the Lord’s feet, the posture of a disciple, not so much listening to the words Jesus was saying, but more so aware she was in the presence of the Word – a big difference – just soaking up his love.

It is rather ironic the Christian world has largely given lip-service to this kind of prayer when tourist pamphlets advertise doing yoga on a beach to lure people to an exotic destination. The late Bishop Sheen attributed his success in preaching completely to the time he spent in contemplation during his morning “holy hour.” Fr. Armand Nigro SJ taught us the importance of a “holy hour” during a thirty-day retreat in Spokane before I was ordained a priest. It is a practice that I have continued ever since, into which I have inserted the four stages of Lectio Divina: lectio (reading), meditation (meditation), oratio (praying with the passage) and finally contemplatio (contemplation – just being in the Lord’s presence like Mary of Bethany).

In this holy hour I try not to think or feel anything but rather just trust that God is doing whatever God wants to do within me as I waste time with God. It is a real test of faith and a great way of praying for a recovering workaholic, as I am not doing anything for a whole hour! I can honestly say that my homilies very often mysteriously seem to form themselves during that special time. I would encourage us to make some time each day for contemplative prayer. As Franciscan Bob Mitchel used to teach, most people live busy days into which they try to insert moments of prayer. It should be the other way around – we should live prayerful lives into which we insert activity.

The second part of Jesus’ teaching on the vine is to bear fruit. The words that best describe this action are agape love and selfless service. A very pertinent question that we can ask ourselves is, “What would Jesus do?” and then proceed to do it, regardless of the cost.

Bearing fruit is to be like Jesus, totally wrapped up in caring for others and sharing our selves with others in trusting fellowship. Like Jesus, we are to use our skills and talents in an unselfish way. I don’t usually use negative examples but the weekly meditation by Ron Rolheiser describes what can happen, to my mind, when we don’t abide in Jesus:

“We don’t turn the other cheek. We don’t really love our enemies. We don’t wish good to those who wish us harm. We don’t bless those who curse us. And we don’t genuinely forgive those who murder our loved ones.

We are decent, good-hearted persons, but persons whose heaven is still too-predicated on needing an emotional vindication in the face of anyone or anything that opposes us. We can be fair, we can be just, but we don’t yet love the way Jesus asked us to, that is, so that our love goes out to both those who love us and to those who hate us. We still struggle, mightily, mostly unsuccessfully, to wish our enemies well.

But for most of us who like to believe ourselves mature, that battle remains hidden, mostly from ourselves. We tend to feel that we are loving and forgiving because, essentially, we are well-intentioned, sincere, and able to believe and say all the right things; but there’s another part of us that isn’t nearly so noble.

The Irish Jesuit, Michael Paul Gallagher, put this well when he wrote (In Extra Time): “You probably don’t hate anyone, but you can be paralyzed by daily negatives. Mini-prejudices and knee-jerk judgements can produce a mood of undeclared war. Across barbed wire fences, invisible bullets fly.”  Loving the other as oneself, he submits, is for most of us an impossible uphill climb.

So where does that leave us? Serving out a life-sentence of mediocrity and hypocrisy? Professing to loving our enemies but not doing it? How can we profess to be Christians when, if we are honest, we have admitted that we are not measuring up to the litmus-test of Christian discipleship, namely, loving and forgiving our enemies?

Perhaps we are not as bad as we think we are. If we are still struggling, we are still healthy.  In making us, it seems God factored in human complexity, human weakness, and how growing into deeper love is a life-long journey.

What can look like hypocrisy from the outside can in fact be a pilgrimage, a Camino walk, when seen within a fuller light of patience and understanding.”

The Eucharist itself is an experience of abiding in Jesus through Word and Sacrament, that also mandates us to go out and bear fruit by sharing the love of God with all others. May our celebration deepen our intimate relationship with Jesus and empower us to live it out through selfless service.