The Co-incidences of God Working Over Time

When we read the Gospels, it is almost inevitable that our attention is first drawn to persons rather than to time.  Of course, there is ultimately no separation between the two, because human persons live their lives and work out their salvation precisely in time.  But I propose that it is, so to speak, well worth our time to examine closely the chronological references---implicit and explicit---in today’s Gospel.

First we hear of a feast in Jerusalem, to which the people of Galilee had gone and from which they had returned.  Fidelity to God’s time requires movement, even pilgrimage.  Next there is a reference to the miracle that Jesus worked in Cana at a particular wedding feast for a particular couple on a particular day:  The specificity of God’s time can be intimately personal.  Very dramatically, ordinary time (and even the memory of great festivity) can be interrupted by the tragedy of illness and the threat of death---the royal official intervenes at Cana for his son who is dying in Capernaum.  After using this occasion to chide people for constantly expecting the heavenly intervention of “signs and wonders,” the Lord Jesus responds to the official’s faith and cures his son, but without making the walk back to Capernaum.  The man discovers upon inquiring of his slaves that the fever left his son “about one in the afternoon.”  The man marvels that “just at that time Jesus had said to him, ‘Your son will live,’ and he and his whole household came to believe.”  As God, Christ does not need the dimension of space to work through time.  These divine “coincidences” reveal the gentle humility and subtle sovereignty of the Lord’s non-manipulable benevolence, temporal and trans-temporal.

When the illness involving my jaw brought me to Florida for surgery, I had the great blessing of recovering at the Naples home of Larry and Judy Garatoni, which was situated overlooking a bay connected to the Gulf of Mexico.  During these days, I was able to see dolphins for the first time in my life.  Pairs of them would even surface and dive underneath our deck as if to offer a brief greeting before swimming off to continue their day’s business.  They were a marvel to behold.  Having recently myself received three “blowholes” drilled into my splint for improved breathing (and ingestion of liquids), I certainly felt a special affinity to these marine mammals!

In any case, my days of convalescence in the Garatoni home were filled with deep peace and restorative relaxation.  In addition to the crazy regimen of speed dining, jaw therapy, and medication intake, I had plenty of leisure time each day to celebrate my “private Mass,” pray the Liturgy of the Hours and the Rosary, read, walk, and begin to resume my running.  I completely ignored the news of the outside world and all of the markers of its time.  Everything was so peaceful and beautiful in the Garatoni home that it was as if time had stopped for me and I was able to taste something of eternity.  In the midst of all this loveliness, for some reason I was particularly drawn to an amazing fireplace in Larry’s office with striking accents of carved green and brown onyx.  I remember telling him that this was, in my opinion, the most beautiful object in the whole house.  In his humility, Larry demurred at acquiring this seeming extravagance as the result of a moment of weakness, but I insisted that the world needed stonemasonry of this quality.  And so the conversation ended.

On the first Sunday I returned to Queen of Peace, I was so happy to be back at my Parish, truly my most beautiful home.  In the midst of all the gifts of soup and other tokens of love, Ruth Carillo handed me a plastic bag filled with lots of bubble wrap.  She said that Pat Kessick---whose funeral I had celebrated on January 4 before I left for Florida---had personally wrapped this gift for me and wanted me to have it.  After removing layer after layer of protective wrapping, I held in my hand a beautiful hand-carved dolphin, made of green and brown onyx!  I was slack-jawed.  Ruth was puzzled and a little disturbed at how taken aback I was, so much so that she sent the following reassuring note about the dolphin a few hours later:  “Please put your mind at ease regarding the dolphin you received from Pat.  It was, indeed, picked out by her personally to give to you.  She helped to wrap it up and then we wrote your name on it.  There are only three other things that she picked out personally to be given to people.   She said that this dolphin was unique in her collection (and it is; all her other dolphins are brass or ceramic) and it reminded her of you.” 

Before I had left for surgery, I was given from the Parish Office a list of Mass intentions to offer each day I was gone, and I knew that I had offered a Mass for Pat.  Like the royal official in today’s Gospel, I also had a hunch and a hope about the Lord’s timing and went back to the sheet to look at the persons and dates included in my celebration of the Eucharistic feast.  Sure enough, I celebrated the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for Patrica Kessick on January 30, 2013, the very first day I moved into the Garatoni home where I saw the dolphins.

In early Christian iconography, the dolphin was recognized as a type or figure of Christ.  To paraphrase the Traditional Catholicism website, the dolphin was thought by the ancients to be the “king of the fishes.” It was noted for the swiftness of its motion and the benevolence of its strength, “for it was supposed that it could not be controlled except by its love for man.  Its affection for man was said to be so great, that it proved not only most docile to anyone kindly approaching it, but would follow the fishermen, recognize them individually, and frequently warn them against storms by changing its usually frolicsome gambols into straight motion towards port.  The Greeks called it ‘philanthropos,’”---lover of man.

Why, in the end, do we believe in Christ and love Him?  Is it simply the encounter with His Person, or is it not rather also the mysterious chronology of the intertwining of our lives with His through time?  Because the Divine Word has become flesh to save us in time, we can be sure that the coinciding of persons and events in the life of the Church---be they religious feasts or tragedies like illness or death--- will be our way to discover the One beyond time loving us within time. 

Thus it is no coincidence (in the sense of happenstance) that Jesus Christ chooses the feast of Passover as the salvific context for His Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  As the disciples pondered the significance of this timing in the Risen One’s Easter light, they knew that the Lord had been acting in their lives all along at a deeper, more comprehensively redemptive level of utmost refinement---well before they recognized all of the connections.  And so Christ acts in us this Lent in view of this Easter.  We should keep this maritime mystery (the sign of Jonah!) well in mind in view of tomorrow, when the Cardinal-electors will gather in Conclave to elect a new successor to St. Peter the Fisherman.