Dear Friends,
In Honolulu, Hawaii, there is a road called Easy Street. I turned into it one day to see where it went. It was a dead end.
This little story makes us laugh because it bespeaks a certain truth, namely, that easy streets do dead end.
Things that are important, on the other hand, take work. We know that.
Of all the aspects of life that are the most demanding of us are building, sustaining or letting go of relationships.
Relationships begin by choice or by chance. We spend a lifetime being accessible to loved ones, to groups that share deep realities with us. We struggle a lifetime to be accessible to our God, who is always accessible to us. We share seemingly unimportant stories and daily routines with loved ones until that day the crisis of holy darkness comes. And then, nothing is ever the same as it was before. It seems almost contradictory to say this, but in the crisis of holy darkness, we see our relationships in a new light. When we are caught in a crisis not of our own making, we want to phone or text family and friends to say I love you, lest we don’t survive the moment.
Crisis make the relationship. But it may also break the relationship. Relationships are broken by death, by choice, by misunderstanding or by means beyond our control. Some relationships, like bones that are broken, become stronger when mended. More mature than ever. Some broken relationships are better left in pieces. We need to walk away from those relationships which are personally destructive of ourselves or others.
While our hearts are hospice to some relationships, they can be midwives to new or renewed relationships.
Some relationships engage us personally and directly, others are personal but push us beyond our preset boundaries. What I mean here is that we are called by our baptism into Christ to relate to others in unexpected ways – as peacemakers and truth-seekers, truth-tellers and reconcilers, builders of a culture of life. It is more comfortable to limit our boundaries to family and friends. But that is not Christ’s way.
We won’t find Him on Easy Street. His is not a dead end, though we might fear that.
Jesus’ way is the narrow road where we draw strength by staying close together, where our companions are the lion and the lamb who have befriended each other, where Christ’s light illuminates us from within, so that we and others can walk into the future with confidence.
In this 21st Century, if we are not mindful of what is happening, we may be shaped more by our social class, desire for economic security and ethnic patterns than by Christ’s question “Who are my mother and brothers and sisters?” (Mark 3.33)
Who are we as we go forward in this effort to love one another? The 13th century scholar, Thomas Aquinas, in a moment of poetic brilliance tells us who we are:
“Our hearts irrigate the earth. We’re fields before each other.
"How may we live in harmony?
"First we need to know we’ re madly in love with the same God.”
~Sister Joan Sobala
