I love being able to make connections. I love when things in my life that don't necessarily seem like they should go together end up overlapping, especially in unpredictable ways. Connecting things is the way I learn and remember best.
I always felt like the youth mass at 5pm back home was too late in the day. My entire life I had spent Sunday mornings attending mass. But now at school I got to the 9pm mass every Sunday. And I love it! Especially after a long, stressful, exhausting, difficult week it is relieving and relaxing to be able to go to mass on Sunday night. It never fails that when I walk in to the breath-takingly beautiful church feeling anxious and tired and weak and unsure of things, I walk out of the wide open doors, down the steps shaking hands of one or two or three priests, feeling at peace. At peace and loved and lifted and happy.
Tonight was no exception.
I especially loved the Gospel reading and father's homily. The Gospel reading was John 21:1-19. It was one of the stories after Jesus had risen and appeared to the disciples. They were fishing and had an unsuccessful night, but when someone called from the shore and told them to cast their net again to the other side they realized it was their loved Lord as the net became so full and heavy they struggled to bring it in. Then Jesus ate with them, and afterwards asked Simon Peter three times if he loved him. I have heard this story many times, but most recently we had just read and discussed it in my theology class last week. Having this connection kept my attention and helped me to listen and think as it was read.
Father's homily reflected mainly on the Gospel. He talked about the importance of hearing someone tell us "I love you." That just as the man in The Fiddler on the Roof needed to hear his wife say she loved him, Jesus needed to hear Peter say he loved him. I was delighted that in theology class we had discussed this, and I knew the three times Jesus asked Peter if he loved him were representative of the three times Peter denied Jesus on Holy Thursday, as the priest said. However, I did not know the further explanation the priest gave. That in English there is just one word for love (if only there were more), but there are three words for love in Greek (I believe?) which is what the original story was written in. And Jesus asked the first two times, Peter do you agape me? However, Peter was unable to answer yes to that, so he responded saying I philos you. The third time Jesus asked Peter do you phil me and Peter said yes, I philos you. (Philos meaning brotherly love, agape meaning unconditional and unselfish love, and the third is eros meaning emotional love and also sexual love).
I also made a connection between the Gospel reading and Shauna Niequist's new book- Bread and Wine- that I just received Thursday in the mail and have started reading. I love it, everything about it, and am trying to read it slowly, bit by bit. To make it last and to let the beautiful words and stories be ingested and soaked up.
She writes in the introduction that she is a bread person and a wine person, but "more than that, I am a bread-and-wine person. By that I mean that I'm a Christian, a person of the body and blood, a person of the bread and wine. Like every Christian, I recognize the two as food and drink, and also, at the very same time, I recognize them as something much greater- mystery and tradition and symbol. Bread is bread and wine is wine, but bread-and-wine is another thing entirely. The two together are the sacred and the material at once, the heaven on earth, the divine and the daily."
She continues a few pages later, writing, "At the very beginning, and all through the Bible, all through the stories about God and his people, there are stories about food, about all of the life changing with the bite of an apple, about trading an inheritance for a bowl of stew, about waking up to find the land littered with bread, God's way of caring for his people; about a wedding where water turned to wine, Jesus' first miracle; about the very first Last Supper, the humble bread and wine becoming, for all time, indelibly linked to the very body of Christ, the center point for thousands of years of tradition and belief. It matters. It mattered then, and it matters now, possibly even more so, because it's a way of reclaiming some of the things we may have lost along the way."
[Many of these Bible references I can also connected to my Theology class this semester]
I love that tonight during mass I not only got to partake in holy communion, receiving the bread and wine turned into the body and blood of Christ. But also that the Gospel was about food and being fed and sharing a meal.
Oh and another connection of food and being fed and writing, the paper for English that I have been diligently working on for quite a while is actually about the healthy and sustainable benefits of localized food.
I also love that I am making another connection by this post in itself, writing about all of the things I loved, echoing the message of love received in the Gospel and in mass itself.
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