-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at www.usccb.org
-check out this week's LinC Letter at www.parishlincletter.blogspot.com
-I will be celebrating mass at 12:30pm and 6:00pm on Sunday
Prohibited Encounters of the Christian Kind
We might be able to call this meeting of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, the woman at the well, a "prohibited encounter of the Christian kind". That's a little twist on a movie made famous in the 1970s about extraterrestrial visitors.
This is our first week of "church@home: friends encountering Christ!" The entire premise of this Lenten "Home" mission is the gospel call to meet Christ in the human encounter of love. We call those encounters of love communion.
The strange thing about this first week's encounter is the prohibited nature of it. Because of the people involved, the location, the religious orientation of each, the time of day, and the personal story of each this encounter is not only unlikely, unexpected, but almost prohibited by the mores and the traditions of the time.
The call and the lesson for us as the disciples of Jesus is 1. Do we believe that Christ is available to us and to other people through human encounter? And 2. How many people, persons, types, groups, etc are "prohibited" for you, meaning "off limits" for us? Some of these barriers to encounter might be based on our upbringing, our religious thinking, our sense of what is polite, our fear of others. Others of these barriers are imposed by our hurt feelings, past injuries, resentments. We are not anticipating, expecting, nor looking forward to meeting Jesus through encounter with any of "those" people. What a shame
This Lenten journey is an invitation for us to "get over it". It is an opportunity to have our minds changed, converted, the freedom to look at these people not as something to be avoided but rather as an opportunity to draw closer to real life, real God, heaven. It will demand some understanding, forgiving, accompaniment, and integration...a change of heart! But that's what religious life in the Catholic Church is all about, repentance, conversion, change of mind and heart.
So who's on your list ? And how might one of these prohibited encounters draw you more closely to the church, to heaven, to God?
