It is a serious thing / Just to be alive / On this fresh morning / In this broken world!  

-Mary Oliver

One of the most hopeful and grounding passages in the New Testament is found in today’s Gospel of Matthew, in Jesus’s promise to the disciples that, “I am with you always, until the end of the age” (28:20). 

We have great need for such hope and grounding today, since, in the last number of years, the world seemed to slip off its axis and the earth below us shifted.

With violence, war, and famine plaguing the globe; a cataclysmic pandemic that separated us by death and by political tribe; welcome, shelter and safety denied to migrants; neighbors lacking food, housing, healthcare, and fair wages; any “other” hated and reviled; citizens shedding democratic principles and hurtling us toward authoritarianism; a dangerous conflation known as Christian Nationalism; a warming climate and imminent ecological disaster…Such widespread upheaval exhausts the mind and distresses the spirit. 

Yet Jesus’s entire message, the promptings of Spirit, Catholic Social Teaching, and our very humanity call us to respond in some way. Catholic Relief Services, quoting Bishop David J. Malloy, reflected this weighty reality in its recent call for prayers of peace for Israel and Gaza, noting: “…We call on the faithful, and all people of good will, to not grow weary…” 

At this collision of unmooring events, the Spirit’s grounding and hopeful presence offers us resilience. More than ever, we collectively need a mature spirituality able to respond, and our own inner journeys to recognize that God’s law and Spirit have been “written upon our hearts” to help us discern the way (Jer 31:33, Ezk 36:26, Heb 10:16, 2Cor 3:3).

This Sunday’s focus on the Trinity invites reflection on some deeper questions these global events stir up. How do we now understand Father sending Son, and Son offering Spirit (Advocate, Counselor, Comforter) to be with us through challenges “until the end of the age?” How does Jesus’s message to the world – its broadness of scope and heart, its symbolism, its invitation to a lifetime journey of spirit-seeking-Spirit – translate to us today in our own soul journeys? And how does it guide our collective response to the world’s needs?

Franciscan friar Fr. Richard Rohr considers an inner journey essential to birthing the soul, the True Self. In his book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Rohr says this happens in the second half of life, a journey he says not everyone makes. Taking the second journey is not strictly chronological, but “the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary,” he writes. 

The task in the first half, he says, is building the container of one’s life – identity, home, friends, community, security, etc. It focuses on outward demands and expectations, and is driven largely by the ego, the false self. To “believe a few right things or perform some right rituals” often can “largely substitute for actual spirituality,” and unfortunately, “…a high percentage of people never get to the contents of their own lives!” he writes. But this first task is only the “starting gate,” “the warm-up act, not the full journey,” “the raft but not the shore.”  

Eventually struggles, and promptings of the “still small voice,” lead those who listen, to begin the real inner work of spirit. Rohr says it will feel at first like failing at the first task, like falling. But those who take the second journey become “Big Picture” thinkers, beyond their immediate container and its needs, and become necessary guides to others along the path. “The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.” 

Perhaps we will not be able to fully attend to the questions and troubles of this age until we collectively live in the second journey. But on a recent evening in my backyard, a legion of honey bees hummed in deep pink blooms of a flowering crab apple tree, and later, the Northern Lights danced across the skies. These seemed timely glimpses of God’s Spirit present in this age, and encouragement to not grow weary amid the broken parts of the world.

“I believe resilience is the secular word for faith – the ability to trust and let go,” writes Fr. Rohr. The Center for Action and Contemplation he founded offers daily meditations along a yearly theme, and 2024’s “Radical Resilience” explores the very concerns many of us share. It begins: “Contemplation helps us engage with a world on fire – without burning up or out.” The center’s resources can be found here. For an archive of previous readings, start here.

In addition, John O’Donohue, who was an Irish poet, author, and philosopher, offered many fine insights. Excerpts from his books can be found on this page.

One example for meditation:

For Peace
As the fever of day calms towards twilight
May all that is strained in us come to ease.
We pray for all who suffered violence today,
May an unexpected serenity surprise them.
For those who risk their lives each day for peace,
May their hearts glimpse providence at the heart of history.
That those who make riches from violence and war
Might hear in their dreams the cries of the lost.
That we might see through our fear of each other
A new vision to heal our fatal attraction to aggression.
That those who enjoy the privilege of peace
Might not forget their tormented brothers and sisters.
That the wolf might lie down with the lamb,
That our swords be beaten into ploughshares
And no hurt or harm be done
Anywhere along the holy mountain.

-From his book To Bless the Space Between Us

A car rolls down the alley and stops near the guild house of the Episcopal church at the other end. There’s a Little Free Pantry there, started by the congregation in 2022 to help folks whose paycheck or food bank support wasn’t stretching through the month. Anyone can anonymously pick up what they need any time, and anyone with extra can drop off. In this western part of our state, many locals lost their rentals and became food insecure with the post-pandemic influx of new residents. One parishioner noticed free pantries while visiting Chicago and approached her vestry to try one here. They spread the word to members, neighbors and the community, people began to donate goods, and use has increased since. 

Elsewhere in town, a woman noticed a homeless man while hauling her clothes to the laundromat one day and realized that a chore to many is a luxury to others. With prayer, research, advice, a cooperating laundromat, many volunteers, and her own family’s tax return as start-up, she began a community-supported, free and anonymous Laundry Love service. It provides coins, detergent and friendly help, aimed at giving homeless and low-income people the dignity of clean clothes and linens. Now called Loads of Dignity, it also provides toiletries, kids’ items, and shower vouchers, with support from individuals, churches, civic organizations, a temporary shelter, benefit fundraisers, grants from businesses and foundations, and even a school kids’ penny drive. 

These were two new ideas here. It takes a village, but sometimes it starts with one person awake to the Spirit.