Dear Friends,
Yearning is not an everyday word in our vocabulary. Though an uncommon word, deep within us we yearn for harmony and peace, the richness of life shared, those realities that unite us as one.
Every age of human life, from the beginning, has uttered the cry of Habakkuk in today’s first reading – the cities of Europe overrun by the Mongols, the Jews remembering the Holocaust, the Japanese who bear the scars of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Naturals disasters in our country and across the globe, the events of 9/11, the unprovoked war in Ukraine make people cry out:
How long, O Lord? I cry for help and you do not listen!
I cry to you “Violence!” but you do not intervene.
Our own city is plagued by murders of young people, battered women seeking shelter, pedestrians struck by drug or alcohol-impaired drivers. You and I are the brother and sister of everyone who suffers violence. We share in the cry of Habakkuk to God for help.
We want the day to come when there will be no more racism, when we will all be color blind. No more terrorism. Life will be too precious to be bombed or otherwise deliberately destroyed. No more sexism. Women will not be demeaned, used or considered inferior and men will not be pressured to live out destructive standards or die maintaining expected images.
We yearn for these things and more. In the light of all the Gospel can inspire, we yearn for a day when our church will pay so much attention to the growth and needs of people in Christ’s name that it cannot afford time to mistrust its members – a time when the strife and clamorous discord that Habakkuk speaks about are gone.
Yearning. We yearn for human possibilities that seem impossible. Left to ourselves, we might despair and smother the yearning in us before our hopes get too high. We fear the apparently impossible.
But listen to God answering Habakkuk and us as well:
Jesus, throughout the Gospel, gives us an unerring vision – to love without clutching, to live without contention, to serve without competition. When we feel the yearning in ourselves for these or analogous things, it is God speaking to us.
Let’s face it, though. We don’t believe the vision is possible or that it is coming or that we have what it takes to live by the vision.
But God knows us. God has not given us a cowardly spirit, Paul reminds Timothy today. Rather, God has given us a spirit that makes us strong, loving and wise. Gifted with this spirit, as well as a faith that leads us to do the apparently inexplicable. Jesus encourages us to be so/do so in today’s Gospel.
The yearning of God for us becomes our yearning for God. It is not born of a naïve optimism but of bedrock confidence in the God who says:
~Sister Joan Sobala
We want the day to come when there will be no more racism, when we will all be color blind. No more terrorism. Life will be too precious to be bombed or otherwise deliberately destroyed. No more sexism. Women will not be demeaned, used or considered inferior and men will not be pressured to live out destructive standards or die maintaining expected images.
We yearn for these things and more. In the light of all the Gospel can inspire, we yearn for a day when our church will pay so much attention to the growth and needs of people in Christ’s name that it cannot afford time to mistrust its members – a time when the strife and clamorous discord that Habakkuk speaks about are gone.
Yearning. We yearn for human possibilities that seem impossible. Left to ourselves, we might despair and smother the yearning in us before our hopes get too high. We fear the apparently impossible.
But listen to God answering Habakkuk and us as well:
The vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment and will not disappoint.
If it delays, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not wait.
Jesus, throughout the Gospel, gives us an unerring vision – to love without clutching, to live without contention, to serve without competition. When we feel the yearning in ourselves for these or analogous things, it is God speaking to us.
Let’s face it, though. We don’t believe the vision is possible or that it is coming or that we have what it takes to live by the vision.
But God knows us. God has not given us a cowardly spirit, Paul reminds Timothy today. Rather, God has given us a spirit that makes us strong, loving and wise. Gifted with this spirit, as well as a faith that leads us to do the apparently inexplicable. Jesus encourages us to be so/do so in today’s Gospel.
The yearning of God for us becomes our yearning for God. It is not born of a naïve optimism but of bedrock confidence in the God who says:
Wait for the vision. It will surely come.
~Sister Joan Sobala
