Grace in the Wilderness

GRACE IN THE WILDERNESS

“The people who survived the sword
found grace in the wilderness....”
-Jeremiah 31:2

Pilgrim, our representative Catholic Christian, has just left Mass in Newton, Connecticut. He passes Sandy Hook Elementary where he hears gunfire. In minutes the police, SWAT teams , and the media surround the school where a gunman is firing at will inside. The Eucharist barely on his lips, Pilgrim sits horrified as the battle to contain the killer ensues. Full of God’s life, he can not grasp at this point how he could step so quickly from holy ground into a wilderness of death.
We must ask ourselves what should Pilgrim do. As always God’s word offers an answer. Like the Hebrews who found grace in the wilderness when the Lord wrote the Mosaic Law on their hearts and brought them out of exile imposed by the Assyrians(612 B.C.), the Lord offers Pilgrim(ourselves) in our wilderness, grace leading us ultimately to the heavenly Promised Land.
First, we must establish what wilderness means. Need it be only what Pilgrim experiences? For most people, wilderness is a place where vegetation is minimal, the land is dry, and only the strongest survive. On the other hand, some perceive wilderness more positively: it can be a quiet place in our homes where we meet the Lord in prayer. But in the Old Testament, the wilderness is a place where Yahweh and his Chosen People form a covenant, an intimate relationship in which God promises to care for them while they agree to follow the Law given to Moses. So the wilderness is, as Benedict XVI says in The Spirit of Worship, the place where God’s people worship him, or more fully, where God feeds, chastises, forgives, rescues, and leads them to the promised land, an actual territory “flowing with milk and honey”(Exodus 3:8).
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Pilgrim’s (and our) first step is embracing the wilderness-not the world Pilgrim witnessed, but that spoken of in the Vatican II documents. In “The Church in the Modern World” we read: “The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well.” Implicit in this wise observation are the Newton Elementary students and staff, the hobo begging on our street corners, the family attending church, the rich and the poor. But according to the Vatican II document we can not be mere observers: “The earth and the heavenly city penetrate one another is a fact open only to the eyes of faith.” As St. John says we are in the world, but not of it.
But how do all these observations apply to Pilgrim back at Newton Elementary. Fearful, he feels like fleeing home and opening his Bible to pray for the staff and students under siege. But then in faith he asks what would Jesus do. Pilgrim dashes from his car, wraps his arms around parents and children racing from the school, leads then to shelter behind a tree where he kneels in prayer. In other words he has just embodied what Benedict writes in his Apostolic Letter The Door of Faith: “The Church as a whole and her pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the one who gives life, and life in abundance.”
But in the wilderness Pilgrim needs a new manna. So, Benedict reaffirms the Lord feeding us, i.e Pilgrim, with the Eucharist and God’s word: “We must rediscover a taste for feeding ourselves on the word of God, faithfully handed down by the Church, and on the bread of life, offered as sustenance for his disciples”(par. 2). Thus, when the priest blesses Pilgrim and says, “Go and announce the gospel of the Lord,” the celebrant does not mean for Pilgrim to exit
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quickly to buy groceries before the food mart closes, but by every act to affirm that Jesus is still in control in a world needing to affirm the dignity of the human person and life itself.
Belgian Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens, a major Vatican II contributor, was once asked why he was such a man of hope. Despite current crises of his time like the Cuban Missile crisis 1962, and a Church polarized by conservative and liberal views, the Cardinal answered he believed God’s Spirit was still working in the world. Many reading today’s news would find Cardinal Suenens’ statement hard to accept. But the Catholic Christian response would be the Lord is working stronger in today’s world because he empowers through faith Pilgrim to bring the Lord into the world, however horrible the events might be; we are co-redeemers of our immediate circumstances.
What then is grace in the wilderness for today’s pilgrims. The grace is a process through which we enter the desert, physical or psychological, humbly form a covenant with Jesus in the Church, and bring that faith into the world as we journey to the Father. Specifically, the grace in the wilderness is Jesus himself, the fulfilment of Old Covenant. As a recent writer in The Word Among Us has written: “God has made us his own people, he delivered us from slavery, he fed us in the desert, he enabled us to defeat our enemies and settle in the Promised Land” (February 17, 2013). If we can live this calling, we can face all situations, even a Sandy Hook Elementary.