Where are you going? If you take a second and give that question some thought, and over the course of the day running it through your processor a time or two, then where are you going? Heading to the coffee pot, town, work, church, where are you going? Seems that so many decisions about our travel and our “need to do” list occur with little thought and seemingly little preparation. But after all, that is the fullness of our freedom, and yet at the same time the emptiness we just can’t seem to fill without wrestling with our deathly passions.
Last night we attentively listened to the life story of St. Mary of Egypt and I believe if we are all honestly looking inward at our choices and our addictive behaviors, we can look down and see our path towards salvation has been just as bumpy. Saint Mary was blindly tumbling through life without hope, without direction, and then by the love of the Theotokos, realized the deathly passions and the emptiness that consumed her. What about you, where are you going?
In our aging here and now, most of us want a genie to grant our wishes instead of a God who wants us to experience salvation. And in that experience we taste struggle and failure, illness and injury. And in that struggle and failure, illness and injury, we surrender and heal. This is preparation for what is coming! There is a greater power that yearns for us to desire Him and His way of life. It’s your choice, where are you going?
In the Gospel reading just a bit ago, our Lord informs the disciples on the road to Jerusalem of the upcoming challenges He will face, His humiliation, false accusations, betrayal, death and resurrection on the third day. In being fully human, He experienced some of the same struggles that we do. Granddad used to ask me if things were going in one ear and out the other, and perhaps this is what the disciples were experiencing, they heard but didn’t understand. They were following, they had left their normal routines to follow Christ and learn from His teachings, and each day seemed to be a new experience, and not one they completely understood at the time. A leap of faith, or perhaps a since of pull, or belonging towards the Alpha and the Omega? Saint Gregory the Great writes: “Our Redeemer, foreseeing that the minds of His disciples would be troubled because of His Passion, foretold to them from afar both the humiliation of His Passion and the glory of His resurrection. This He did, so that when they would behold Him dying, as He had foretold, they would not doubt He would also rise again. But since the disciples, still carnal men, could not grasp the meaning of the words of the mystery, He wrought a miracle.” [Steadfastness in Prayer, Hom. 2, P.L. 76 (cols. 1081-1086), in Toal, I:422(1).]
Many of the struggle we face we don’t completely understand either but yet we must stay on the course and finish strong. I can tell you this, when the stormy winds try to blow me here and there and around in circles, I reach for the cross, and grasp it with everything I have in me! I am simply not complete if I can’t be near the feet of Christ, close enough to see what changes I still need to make in my time left here in this uncertain world. That’s where I want to be, where are you going? It takes an effort, it takes planning and it takes plenty of participation and some suffering!
“I am held fast in the mire of sin, and there is no strength or courage in me; the tempest of my trespasses has overwhelmed me. Look upon me, 0 Virgin, I entreat Thee, for thou has borne the Word Who alone loves mankind. Deliver me from every sin, from all the passions that destroy my soul, and from every ill inflicted by the enemy, that I may sing with joy. Intercede with thy Son and God, 0 Undefiled, that remission of transgressions may been given to those who in faith take refuge beneath thy protection.” (Prayer to the Theotokos)
Fr. Gabriel Weller 4-6-2025
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