Dear Friends,
It is commonplace today in television shows, movies, books and music to find religion absolutely absent as if it did not exist and people never go to church. I am not sure when this began to happen, but it is always a surprise when we do run into some popular entertainment where people are actually portrayed as believers and belong to a church community. I am caught off guard when they talk about religion in a positive manner. More common is the show that portrays the believers as having closed minds or almost evil in their critical judgment of others. This core part of human life, faith in God, is missing from most contemporary portrayals. How sad that is. So, it was a surprise for me that in two of the novels I read while I was on vacation there was a positive portrayal of people who are believers and attend church. In neither novel were they the main character and the main character does not really understand the issue of faith, but they do find the person of faith intriguing and wise.
The other surprising item, present in both of these recent novels, was a portrayal of romantic love that was slow developing and embracing the whole of the person. This was a love that grew through friendship over time and made each one of the lovers so much better.
This Sunday, our Gospel reading shows Jesus at a social event, a wedding reception, something where religion is not normally part of the drama. Yet here, Jesus intervenes because the wine has run out – again, not usually part of the religion scene. This holy man is invited by his holy mother to consider the social consequences for the family that had not prepared for all the hard drinking relatives who were at the party. Jesus brings grace and faith to a place where people were not looking for it and most did not notice it even when it brought them more wine.
What our Gospel offers us today is a powerful example that there is not a big gap between the ordinary and the divine. There is a natural connection between the two. Several years ago, at the funeral of the father of a good friend, I told a story of one of my first encounters with him. I was at a first communion party for his grandson. He was holding court in the living room and drinking a good, strong glass of some liquor. When I walked in, he stopped the story telling and invited everyone in the room to kneel down and receive a blessing. He simply put the drink and the story to the side for a moment so that the powerful presence of God would be remembered. In my homily at the funeral, I talked about the Irish (which he was) notion of thin places. The places where God can easily be found. That for the Irish there was not a great distance between the sacred and the profane. That in the midst of the party, the divine presence was readily available.
You and I, my friends, need to remind our world that in spite of contemporary entertainment’s absence of God, God is not absent. God is ever present. Even in those places where we least expect Him. We need to live in such a way that the power of God’s grace comes gently with us to parties, to work, to gym workouts, to restaurants, to bars, to wedding receptions…like Jesus, we need to turn ordinary water into God’s finest wine.
Peace,
Fr. Damian