Our Venerable Father Anthony of the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev (1073); Forty-Five Martyrs of Nicopolis in Armenia (321-3); Holy Brothers Francis, Mutius and Raphael and Those with Them, Martyred in Damascus (1860)
Galatians 5:22-6:2; Luke 6:17-23
Polyeleos Feast.
Read Luke 6:17-23
If I sleep long enough I will always make my way back into some sort of version of a recurring dream that has to do with being unable to find the place I’m looking for. Maybe it’s a classroom and I’m the student, or it’s a different classroom and I’m the lecturer. It might be a parish that I’m supposed to serve at and I can’t find it and I’m late! My nightmare has to do with not being at peace and being lost.
Although we are never lost once we have found Our Lord (or He has found us first!), we have an important reminder in our gospel today about taking comfort in the fact that we have not arrived, that we are not comfortable here in this world, and that in fact we are continually seeking the Lord and nothing in this world seems to satisfy that longing. This state of constant longing for the Lord, and the resulting discomfort in this world is the “normal life” of a true Christian.
CS Lewis uses the German word sehnsucht to describe this intuition in our hearts. The word has a deep sense of longing, inconsolable yearning or missing something that you might not even know exists. In The Weight of Glory, CS Lewis describes it this way:
Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter…The books or the music in which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it is not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing…For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.
The good news today brothers and sisters is that this world is not enough. Let us keep our eyes and hearts fixed on the Lord and settle at nothing less than His Righteousness and His Kingdom!