I arrived home today from a long weekend in my husband's home province, namely, Ontario. For me, visits to family often serve as benchmarks. Or maybe the better metaphor is an optical exam. Leaving my daily context and entering another gives me the opportunity to see how well I am seeing. To see how my seeing perhaps has changed. Especially when I visit my own family I usually become aware of little nooks and crannies of my heart that appear different this time around. I suppose, as the intuitive introvert that I am, this is how I go about interacting with the world: interiorly.
Even though this latest visit was not with my own family of origin, I became aware of a change in me. I noticed it as seven of us bustled off to a downtown market before lunching with other family. I have customarily greeted my husband's interest in going to the Saturday morning market with a reluctance that bordered on grumpiness, mostly because it always seemed to involve me getting up earlier in the morning than I wished. And, there was just this thing about being in a crowd of people that I found unpleasant. But this Saturday being grumpy didn't really occur to me, even after we mistook the location of the market at first and had to go wandering about looking for it. We entered, and I saw interesting things all around me. I heard fun music. Lots of unique ethnic things caught my eye one after another. I was drawn to chat with a Japanese salesman about his organic green tea (and bought some). I wandered among the various ethnic food vendors and looked into the faces I passed; I noted that some seemed enchanted by my children, and some looked at them as if they were cockroaches. I felt distinctly sad for the latter and wondered what it was that had erased their joy.
As we walked back to our vehicle, I realized that a drastic but very slow change has occurred in my heart. Once upon a time not that long ago, I viewed experiences like this as an uncomfortable being-thrusted into a world that wasn't mine. Crowds of strangers in a culture not my own (yes, Canada has that) seemed a cold world. "They are not like me" is how I might have labeled it. But this weekend, I felt an excitement about a humanity that I share with all of these people. It felt like having a key into the door behind which everyone was. I was, am, "in" with them.
Being "in," in the past, somehow felt to me like it had to have something to do with being a Catholic. And not just "a" Catholic, but a like-me Catholic. To be frank, like-me Catholics are not the majority in Canada. I understand where I got this feeling, after all, I like to feel understood and I like to have a sense of community based on some common thinking and experience. But the grace that has come to me in these last many months of my life, which is summarized well by, but is by no means unique to, the charism of Communion and Liberation, tells me that I have that. I have it loud and clear, deep and firm, and It (His name is Jesus) lives within me. And Jesus loves the world. He loves humanity and longs for it and affirms its good and is not sitting in heaven with a clipboard ready to note our every slip up and chastise us for it in a way that leaves us feeling like nothing more than a series of imperfect acts, of failed tests. He loves us; I daresay He enjoys us, and I think this is what I feel: Jesus enjoyed the market with me, through me.
In 1993, about two weeks after I entered the Church, I went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a group led by John Michael Talbot and Dan O'Neill. It was a monumental life experience. One small sliver of that experience that comes to mind here is JMT's comment at Mass one day that the timing of us being in the Church and the Church being in us is not necessarily simultaneous. I believe he was speaking of our experience of the Church in a deep way. So when I say that this Communion lives in me, that Jesus lives in me, in a real way I know the Church lives in me, in a way that Giussani seems to talk about. (The Church being the continuation of Jesus Christ in time and space.) In this sense there is a huge, chasmic leap between only feeling comfortable around other people who belong to my Church and knowing the ability to encounter another human person because of the Church.
It still startles me how much Fr. Giussani's charism picks up my life and makes such sense out of it.
1 comment:
Yes! I've been wanting to comment on this post from the first moment I read it, but I have also been in such awe of the things that you say, that I felt, maybe too much "reverence" to just rush in an spout off.
Well, I was in the midst of writing my fourth paragraph here, when I decided to cut and past into a post on my own blog. So, you'll have to look there for the rest of my response!
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