Kent Beausoleil, S.J.

Homily: Thirty-Second Sunday In Ordinary Time November 11, 2007 

2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; Psalm 17: 1, 5-6, 8, 15; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38 

As Jesuit novices, part of our two year long novitiate experience was retreating with the Spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius during thirty days of silence at the Jesuit Retreat House 'Eastern Pointe' right on the Atlantic Ocean in Gloucester, Mass. I know its hard to view me, Mr. Social Butterfly, as being able to keep silence for thirty seconds let alone for thirty days but (with one or two exceptions) I was good. 

Well, on one of the final days of the retreat, the retreat master asked me to meditate on God's personal love for me through conversations with Mary, Jesus and God with the addition direction to let the Holy Spirit lead me where the Spirit leads me. However, after 25 plus days of retreating and being deeply immersed in a deeply intimate encounter with God, I entered this particular meditation feeling that all God-loving experiences has been felt and that as far as my heart was concerned the rag had been wrung dry so to speak. 

So I began the meditations not knowing what to expect. It had rained heavily the night before and, I know this whole thing will seem a bit odd, but I started the conversation with Mary, by sitting on a bench and looking deeply into a rain puddle. Suddenly the puddle became Mary and her voice soothed, comforted, and affirmed me. She consoled me with her words and said 'if you want to know about God's love for you then let me take you to Jesus my Son’. 

Flowing out of this puddle and going downhill close to the shore was a little rivulet of water. This rivulet led to a tidal pool and this tidal pool became Jesus. Again after hearing Jesus speak words of encouragement, his naming me his disciple, and his expression of pride in me, I felt and intimacy with Jesus that I had not felt before. He urged me forward on my spirit walk to follow the water all the way down to the shore and there I could talk to this ‘father’ Jesus always alludes to in Scripture, this God about love. 

Looking down among the crags in the rocks, and avoiding the slippery algae covered boulders, I kept my gaze locked on my hiking boots and dare not look up. When I sensed I was at the water’s edge I stopped and heard a voice deep within me call to me, ‘Kent, you want to know the depth of love I have for you, that I have for all creation, if you do then look up’. 

After seeing Mary’s love as a puddle, Jesus’s love as a tidal pool, then to now look up and see the ocean before me as symbolic of God’s immeasureable love for me as well as for the whole world moved me to tears and caused my heart to wrench. The love that God has for me, has for all of us, is unfathomable – unfathomable. God continued, ‘my dear child, the love that you have experienced in your life, and on this retreat, is just a drop of water in a bucket compared to the love that is there for you and for others to experience’. 

God continued to speak to me, ‘on your journey Kent keep you heart open always to drinking in more and more of my love’. So, the Lord calls out to all of us, calls out for us to look beyond these earthly realities, and urges us to learn to let go of those things that keep us from seeing love, feeling love, and being love. Our creator calls to us with tenderness to open our hearts and drink in that immeasurable love. 

Like the seven brothers of our reading from Maccabees, we, as people of faith, believe in the resurrection. We have faith that God will indeed raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life. Further, we have hope in the life of the world to come as we profess in our creed. Finally, our spirit cherishes the hope that God gives to us of being raised. These are not our challenges this day. 

We are challenged , however, to plumb the depths of this love and let it saturate our being. We are moved to a place of transformation, of removing the hardness of our hearts, and letting the flowing water of God’s love cleanse us and heal us – to allow our hearts and souls to drink in more and more of the Lord’s love. We are called to let that love pierce our hearts and to set them on fire with love. We are to develop a heart ready to embrace the unknown wonders that await us in our own resurrections. 

In our humanness, we do see through a glass darkly, yet as God’s children, we also hope and have a deep desire to work out from a place of faith, prayer, and spirituality, the meaning of God’s love. God graces us with the capacity to see beyond our human feters and chains to claim the divine beauty and fulfilling love that awaits us in the resurrection. A beauty and a love that makes us equal to angels for we are truly, as scripture proclaims to us today, children of God, and 
thus children of the resurrection. 

And as Saint Paul consoles us and asks us to direct our hearts to the love of God and the steadfastness of Christ. So also does God call for us to look up from our earthly journey, to look up from the rocky crags, and the slippery parts of life, and see the vast ocean of love that God has for us, this love that gives us eternal life. Our creator calls out to us as love and in love, to have no fear, to dive in, for the water’s fine.