5th Sunday of Easter A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2014

Trust in God still and trust in me. Easier said than done? Trust does not come easily. Can you really trust someone unless you are quite sure that they love you? unconditionally? And even then? I suspect that for most of us, the ones who have come closest to loving us without conditions are our mothers. Over the years, memories can mix with projections of the ideal feminine that arise from the unconscious, and can help to confirm the conviction.

We are in the month of May; and traditionally May is the month of Mary. Here in Mildura today, Filipino parishioners are celebrating the "Flores de Mayo".

Some of us find it easier to trust Mary than to trust God. Yet it need not be that way. Mary could trust God. She had no problem with embracing anything and everything that God asked of her – not just because of the kind of person she had become, but also because of what she knew God to be. Luke paints Mary at her Annunciation peacefully saying, Let it be done to me according to your word. She trusted easily because she knew that God loved her. She knew that all that God could ever wish of her would be that she become more fully alive, more fully human, more loving and irrepressibly hoping.

Jesus said of her, Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it. He saw that as the source of her greatness. Mary heard the Word of God. That is how she knew he loved her. She really heard. She took time to listen. She did not just listen to God’s Word but learnt to tune in particularly to the tone of God’s voice. She learnt to distinguish it from all the voices that assail us daily – the voices around us and the voices within – the urges, the accusations, the spontaneous judgments we deliver, etc.

She let life in all its complexity touch her. And she searched there for signs of the presence of God and for whatever God might be saying. As Luke again said of her, She treasured these things and pondered them in her heart. She discovered the God who loves - who so loved the world that he sent the Son he loved to save the world from itself, its endless violence and its fear of love. She learnt to trust that God of love: My soul proclaims the greatness of God and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.

To the waiters at the Wedding Feast of Cana she said, Do whatever he tells you. She says the same to us. But for us to have any chance of taking that seriously, we need to learn to trust. And to trust we need to discover his love.

Nothing will change… We will not change… Our world will not change… until we learn to hear the tone of his voice, and know his love – not in theory, not on the word of someone else, but from up close. Like Mary, we need to learn to become contemplatives, living life richly with its joys and heartaches, its pleasures and pains, its promises and its threats; pondering it, and finding God there – calling us, empowering us always to choose life, to choose love.

It takes time. We need to choose deliberately, and to persevere. If we do not, we will never truly change, never grow - business as usual, forever. Yet it need not be so. However, a guide can help because, surprisingly, God is regularly present in seeming absence and can communicate through silence.

One way or the other, the world needs contemplatives – people like yourselves who are in touch with life, people who give life, people who, with Mary, can enthusiastically declare, My soul proclaims the glory of God and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.