Promised Land (continued)

 

(continued from previous page)

Scientists who study nature trace the patterns that they find back to underlying laws, clock-like in their precision, regular and ordered. Prophets do the same with human nature, and the seer of our second reading, the visionary disciple John, is just such a prophet. And the law he discerns is love.  It comes down to this:  if God is love, then so are we – for to love is to become who God made us to be, and how God made us when he did so, and why God made us in the first place. And because this is true, it is also true that however much you may have learned over your Xavier years (and it is a very great deal indeed:  learned through the core and through your majors, learned in your classes and outside your classes, learned on the campus and beyond the campus), the lessons that hold all the other lessons together as root and source and center, is love. For when you love, you become yourself, and the more you love, the more yourself you become. You reach across boundaries and divisions and distinctions then, heal and reconcile and resolve. Through love, you find a deeper meaning and purpose in all the rest you have learned, for, through love, you see clearly in your solidarity with your neighbors near and far, the help you can be, the hand you can reach out in service, the difference you can make. 

    We might think of what the evangelist John tells us this way. If God is love, and if to love is to become yourself, then the covenant God offers you on this specific night is to walk forward with Him hand in hand into the land that stretches now beyond you and before you. Just as you can only walk more deeply into that land of promise that is your future but never fully arrive there, so you can only become more deeply who you are made and meant to be without ever fully arriving there either. And you will do both best – discover your futures, discover yourselves – in dialogue with the God who made you, a conversation back and forth whose grammar and syntax arise from the disposition of your heart in faith toward love, and whose vocabulary is composed of all the good you will ever do.

    Jesus in Luke’s gospel takes up the theme of his disciple John and does him one better by going farther. You can almost hear behind his words a question that may have prompted it: Teacher, exactly who are we supposed to love and when are we supposed to love them? Meaning, of course, that there are always people we do not have to love at all and circumstances under which we need not even love those we normally should. Jesus wipes this assumption clean away with His simple but achingly hard command to love our enemies.  It is a wide circle indeed that we are called to cast, encompassing all, forgetting none. The bar Jesus sets before us is high and relentless, one which we can never master fully but only master better, the better to let ourselves be mastered by it. 

    In a way, what Jesus says reminds me of something St. Paul once said, and said so very memorably. Like him, once upon a time we all talked like children, thought like children, acted and reasoned and behaved like children. But the time came for him one day to put childish things away. That day comes to us as well and comes to us indeed day by day by endless day. For to put childish things away is not to change out cargo shorts for Brooks Brothers suits or sweat pants for Ann Klein; change out backpacks for briefcases, or even six packs for chardonnays and merlots. To put childish things away is to remove yourself from the center of your universe and your life, and to put someone else there instead. Human selfishness being what it is, this is never something done once and for all. You have to practice it, work at it, over and over again. We can begin by putting those we deeply love in the center of our concern: spouses, partners, children, friends. But our love is perfected, Jesus says, and we are perfected with it, when we put still others at our centers:  the very next person we meet, whoever that person might be, or the very last person we could ever imagine meeting or would want to.

    What, then is the land into which you are going? And how should you act as you go there? Nothing less than a sliver of God’s kingdom, one that springs into being every time you put one foot down in front of the other, put those feet down deep in the conviction that you will be who you are, knowing that as you do so, you will become one day the good person you are now, only more so. And your life will become the good life it is now, only more so. And the world will become the good world it is now, only more so. Step by step by generous, loving step. Until the kingdom comes around you, glorious and glittering as any glacial lake.

    I mentioned near the beginning of these reflections that on mountain tops like yours tonight, your glances are naturally drawn in three directions – behind you, ahead of you, and around you.  As I begin to bring these reflections to a close, I invite you now to look around you. What do you see as you do so? And who? The “who” is the easy and obvious part. You see others, of course, you who together have learned and accomplished so much.  Who grew together into people more and greater, truer and more beautiful than who you were when first you came to Xavier – and yet, somehow, in all your growing, became nothing so much as deeper, truer, more authentic versions of the people you were then, the people your parents dropped off not quite four years ago with so much hope, hope that is now being realized. And speaking of your parents, there they are, too.  And how true it is that all you have learned and done and become in these last several years is perhaps best measured in the distance your relationship to each another has travelled in these years, where that relationship was then and where that relationship is now. And with you, your friends, your families, are gathered here others as well, companions on the journey who have helped you and encouraged you all along the way, even if all they did was cheer you on from the sidelines like I did.

    So much for the “who” you see around you tonight.  What about the “what”?  Here’s how I would invite you to see it. What do you see when you look through your friends? Look through your parents? Look through your families? Look through your Xavier faculty and community gathered around you here tonight?  Nothing less than the smiling face of God I am guessing: smiling for sure at the good sons and daughters he has made, but smiling still more at the futures that await you in the Promised Land ahead.