15th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 14 July 2024
It is often lamented today that the rites of initiation into adulthood have been lost. We no longer have those rituals which mark the passage from childhood or adolescence into maturity. However, it has been suggested, not without merit, that perhaps one of the principal rites of passage today is overseas travel. We often hear of young people taking time away. With few resources they head off to distant places where for six months, twelve months or more, they move from country to country, culture to culture, working and touring. Often enough they return home then with a new sense of identity and ready for a commitment to work, or study, or relationship that they could not muster beforehand. It has become a time of passage.
Once, Jesuit students for the priesthood had to make a journey of their own as part of their preparation for Ordination. They called it a pilgrimage and they are required to set off on foot to some distant place in the country for several weeks without money or food and to beg, all the time relying on the generosity of others. It is a rather dramatic experience of poverty, uncertainty, dependency and trust.
I remember the story of one such Jesuit pilgrimage. The Jesuit student involved decided that his pilgrimage would be from Melbourne to Perth across the Nullarbor. He didn’t quite walk it, but without money or food, he hitchhiked it. Flat broke he finally made it to Perth, but slumped on the side of the road he wondered what he would do now that he was there.
It was then he met Louie, long-haired and heavily tattooed. Louie offered him shelter on the floor of his boarding house room. In the morning Peter woke to the noise of Louie warming a single can of spaghetti for them both to share. It was the only food in the house. But during breakfast, the landlord burst in and Peter discovered that Louie was about to be evicted. Peter was speechless, overcome by the generosity of the man who had shared the last of the little he had with him. It was a profound experience of the Kingdom of God which breaks into our world whenever vulnerability is transformed into hospitality.
For Peter, his journey across the Nullarbor became a lesson about human generosity and his life was never the same thereafter. It was certainly a rite of passage for him into a deeper awareness of his own humanity and the humanity of others. It was a profound lesson on the nature of the Kingdom of God. He had left Melbourne full of trepidation and fear; he had returned rejoicing and excited with a heart expanded. It was a living experience of today’s gospel.
We may never undertake such a risky project ourselves. But all of us experience periods of life which are about transition just as the gospel story today is in the life of the first disciples. And this period of transition is like a journey for us. We are called to let go of previous ways of doing things, or understanding things. We know we must now face the future without the supports of the past: we go forward without purse, haversack or sandals. Our discipleship of Jesus will often create these kinds of periods for us. These are times of uncertainty, doubt, insecurity.
Yet, as today’s gospel implies, and as the Jesuit’s pilgrimage illustrates, these times can also be occasions of enormous possibility if we enter into them with a peace that comes from an ongoing receptivity, with a peace that comes from an openness to the unexpected, with a peace that comes from a deeply listening heart, a welcoming heart, an hospitable heart.
Maybe the journey we are led into comes in times of sickness, or through the death of someone close to us. Perhaps they come to us through redundancy or through failure of one kind of another. These are all times of passage for us.
They can be times of transformation for us. They can also be times when we experience the mystery of the Kingdom of God: times in which we experience how vulnerability can be transformed into hospitality; times in which we discover our deepest humanity – a humanity that is inviolable, which no one can take away, a humanity written in heaven. When our fear is transformed into joy in this way then we have truly undertaken the rite of Christian initiation.