Luke 24:12-35 (Matins)
Hebrews 11:24-26, 11:32-12:2
John 1:43-51

Good Fellowship

We begin down the path of Great Lent. We tread a clay path reminding of us of our clay feet. But this was not always the case.

From the time we first opened our eyes to this world as newborn infants, our souls have yearned to soar Heavenward. For that is our true and, finally, our only home.

Now, Sisters I do not know if you experienced this, but when I was a very young boy, I had dreams at night of flying — feeling the pressure of the air under my wings, going down the slide in the schoolyard, coming off the bottom, and flying away. I perceive that is our natural element.

But the sovereign of this world and his vast demonic legions have sought to clip our wings, or worse, to dull our desire to take flight, or still worse, even to forget there is such a thing as blue sky and Heaven. For those blessed climes were once their only home, And misery loves company.

The members of the Hermitage Community long ago aspired to learn the art of flight, whose first step is to renounce the world and the world's gravity. Do you know this gravitational pull which grounds all attempts to attain lightness of being? Do you know the powerful attraction of worldly life?

In our case, the first steps away from this toxic attraction, (which at first seemed inescapable) lay in simplifying our lives back to the essentials: taking no more of the world than we truly needed, and to banish from our lives the technologies of television, pop music, and unredeemed internet used as instruments to brainwash us. This tradition of simplicity is deeply enshrined in a spirituality: it is called Franciscan. And each of us independently sought out a Franciscan community: Sr. Mary Anne in 1962, Sr. Mary Martha in 2004, Fr. Columba in 2006. These past sixteen years, our present community has clustered around our superior minister, Sr. Mary Anne, well known as a local saint in the dense hills of southwest Haiti.

Soon after being forced back to the United States, we undertook the longtime aspiration of a pilgrimage to the twenty-one Franciscan missions first established in 1769 in San Diego and then being founded up the California coast to the San Francisco Solano Mission built in 1823.

Now, such a pilgrimage is not the work of a day. Each night we rested wherever we ended the day. One night — the date was August 14, 2016 — we checked the local newspaper for a church to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Assumption of the Mother of God. "What divine timing," I said. "A Holy Assumption Monastery resides right here in this town." So we set off the next day to be present for their patronal feast.

We were warmly greeted by their Abbess, Mother Melania. As we arrived hours in advance, she showed us the heart and jewel of their community, which was the chapel. I stepped inside this holy space peering into the darkness looking for a lighted sanctuary lamp somewhere near the Altar, so I would know whether to genuflect. I turned to Mother and asked, "Is the Lord present?" She did not answer right away. I will never forget her reply: "We have good fellowship here."

Slowly, I began to realize that we had not visited a Western Catholic community, but an Orthodox Catholic community. The name, Holy Assumption Monastery, had fooled us. But I accepted her gentle invitation and entered into the midst of this promised fellowship. In so doing, I stepped out of this world and into another. For all around me and receiving me warmly (I felt) were the saints, whom I already knew — truly, "a great cloud of witnesses." I stood before each in turn, venerating the life-size icons. In particular, I remember St. Tikhon of Moscow, whose relics were also present, and I felt his inviting presence. He had evangelized the Americas, and in particular the so-called Biretta Belt around the Great Lakes where I had encountered his influence. Here was a spirituality very different from the one that I had known — which was overwhelmingly focused on the Blood Sacrifice of Christ. In fact, I had always called the Eucharist "the Holy Sacrifice." But the spirituality now before me was focused not on death, but the life of Christ, the life of the saints, and the good example and traditions the Lord had instituted for all of those who chose to follow His supernal command:

Before us stood saints of every description, born in places scattered throughout the world. Most them did not even share the same language during their earthly journeys. But they did hold one thing in common: they had chosen to obey His command and to follow Him. Later, I thought, the members of our Franciscan community also shared this essential and defining quality. We also could make a just claim to this vast fellowship, each of us having chosen to burn down his or her whole world and to follow the One Who had no place to lay His head.

Here truly was good fellowship, not an individual conception — in its worst form expressed as "me and Jesus" — but a fulfillment of both Great Commandments and, together, an obeisance before the God and Father of all.

You see, Jesus came to earth to love us and to be loved by us: all of us together, Our Father Which art in Heaven. Yet, God's people had become enslaved in a Babylonian-Persian spirituality of blood sacrifice to a distant and forbidding figure. But with Jesus the old ways would be restored eloquently expressed in the first chapter of St. John's Gospel, which we read from this morning:

Heaven? Angels? These were subjects forbidden by the Sadducees. The old ways .... the ways of conversations with God in Eden; of intimate revelations to Abraham; and to Jacob, angels that you actually saw and touched. Jesus had brought all back with a vengeance, for vengeance is a Divine property (Deut 32:35). But this "Day of the Lord" would be different than the one described by the Prophets. It would be intimacy and love and life as we never imagined it .... but as God had imagined it and ordained it from the foundations of the world.

Each day we advance in our journey to be formed in the life of the Master. We help each other even as we exam our own consciences in the struggle to remain true to Him. Banished is the idea that "He died for my sins," which He never taught. And born is the idea, His idea, that

Salvation is a journey. Its Greek original σωτερία / sotería means "to make a safe return home," in that sense, salvation is less about having a "ticket punched" and more about having the way ahead cleared of dangers. It does not refer to the sacrifice of an afternoon, however significant that sacrifice was. We cannot be "saved" in a moment. Jesus of Nazareth did not teach a magic-wand religion. St. Athanasius wrote that, with His Incarnation, the way ahead was unblocked. But it is still left to us to complete our journeys. There is no pixie dust. And

Our sign, our Divine acceptance and approval, will be the miracle of our conversion, our transformation of mind in Christ Jesus, St. Paul says.

Would you like to be converted? Would you like to make a journey from eternal deadness to light and life, as St. John says? Do you seek good fellowship? For the road ahead is long and at times dangerous, and the saints know the way. The Father will not bless you for approaching Him covered with Jesus' blood. He will not bless you for covering yourself with the blood of His Son. For the Kingdom of Heaven is not an admission pass. It is about being. It is a state of conversion, of transformation (Rom 2:12), which has been in process since you first said "Yes" to the world and then, with regret, said "No." At that moment He was waiting, watching along a roadside.

Each of us does not lack for a map to make this holy journey, for the destination has been etched deeply in our minds and our souls from the time we first opened our eyes to this beautiful world. Our destination is our own innocence and the loving, trusting heart of the child, which is the undying love of God and the love of our fellows who are always there loving us and pulling for us.

The whole world was once young and innocent and ruled by our God Who is Love (1 Jn 4:8). And the comely blooms and fragrant trees of that innocent world continue to provide goodly shade, like the Oaks of Mamre, in that place known as the Bosom of Abraham. It is the Bosom of Divine Hospitality, the Bosom of our only Family, and the Bosom of our Father, Which art in Heaven.