I don’t know if other people experience hearing music in their heads during work when there’s a sign of triumph, of understanding, of hope, but I do.
We’re doing quick writes in journals. When students don’t want to lift their pencils or put away their journals because they’re writing, I hear the music in my head, and I understand if only for a moment, why I teach. It is a silent joy because I can’t show it without disrupting the moment.
At mass, this past Sunday, I felt the odd rush of joy at communion despite not having everyone there, because –well, no because, I didn’t seek it. It showed up, and I knew this rush of belonging, of knowing in the mass as I have known in the past at other masses. That deep knowledge that bursts out of the heart and the bones, of knowing we belong here.
The rest of life is full of moments where we don’t feel we belong. We’re cut off from each other by sin, by anger, by hurts, by deeds done and not done, words said that get remembered, and silence that is burned into the memory. Everywhere, we see the divisions between rich and poor, young and old, healthy and not, masked and unmasked, married and not, from this country, from that place, from this culture, from that family. We are the Montagues and the Capulets, spitting at each other for hate’s sake, and wondering why we are not happy. Online and in real life, we tear people down who do not think, feel, look, sound, or dress the way we think they ought. We judge by how people write, talk, their careers, their degrees, their grades, their schools, their families, their zip codes, their phones, their hair, their everything until we find anything. We are a stubborn stiff necked people to a person, who believe we are justified in every stone we propose throwing or having thrown.
Yet here at the mass, at the marriage between Heaven and Earth, we all belong at the table and we are each of us, invited to dine, to feast on Christ, and to bring Christ to all we encounter. How could we not smile? How could we not know this reality -that all of heaven is with us at each mass, and every time we encounter the Eucharist, and that every encounter with another person, is an opportunity to bring Christ to them? We can forget in our broken nature, from all the stones we’ve felt thrown at us, and all the stones we’ve thrown, that we were never told we could merit Heaven, we were always only told, we were gifted Christ.
It’s did we or are we allowing that reality to take hold of the heart of our lives. If we do, all the rest of it falls away, all the rest of it is straw. We’re left with the joy that fills and reverberates off the walls of the Church as we process one by one up to say “Yes” to holding Christ, to tasting Him, to letting Him into our lives yes that intimately.
We have two weeks until Easter, yet every mass remains a feast.
So how do we fast when the bridegroom is here? Fast from snark. Fast from gossip. Fast from ugly stories. Fast from picking at your own emotional wounds. Fast from the last word. Fast from all that helps perpetuate division in your heart and the hearts of others. Make your life a desert where all sin dries up and feast on the still small silence the absence of sin creates, that allows for the hearing of God’s voice.
Happy Lent. Onward, deeper into the desert.
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