The Sight and Gladness of Abraham

In the Gospel readings of these days, we see that the road to Calvary is paved with the shards of fragmented, unresolved arguments and misguided, abandoned hopes.  Steadfastly conversing on this via Crucis with whomever will listen and remain to follow Him to the end, Christ offers these mysterious words pregnant with covenantal promise:  “Abraham your father rejoiced to see My day; he saw it and was glad.” 

In today’s first reading from Genesis, the scope of this promise is sketched by God:  “I am making you the father of a host of nations.  I will render you exceedingly fertile; I will make nations of you; kings shall stem from you.  I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.”  Jesus Christ is, of course, as man one of the earthly descendants of Abraham, even as He is the very same Lord Who created the world and forged its covenants:  “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.”

It is striking that before Jesus’ opponents pick up rocks to stone Him, they attempt to beat Him up with the brute (and brutal) fact of time:  “You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?”  Our Divine Savior is actually mocked by what we might call “chronological bullying.”

People who suffer a physical malady like jaw pain are in a very elemental way bullied by time, in that their suffering seems to know no end (thus shutting down any future of gladness).  If the illness is chronic, it can even ruin the happier past pre-dating the suffering, precisely because the health of once-upon-a-time seems irrecoverable.  But the sick---especially when they are diagnosed or being treated---endure in addition yet another perversity of temporality:  Their sense of time is incessantly determined by medical timetables and therapeutic milestones.  Having “two months to live” or “seven more months until the cast may come off” can appear to a given patient to be either heartening or soul-crushing (or both simultaneously).  Moreover, when there are multiple agonizing stages spaced over stretches of time to attain the restoration of health, the temptation to bouts of frustration or even despair is an ever-present possibility. 

Two weeks ago, for example, I had a phone appointment with Dr. Mark Piper to discuss my progress in healing, which has been excellent and right on schedule.  Up to that call, my sense of time had been governed by: 1.) when I can begin to preach regularly again (= Holy Thursday); 2.) when I can be both the principal celebrant and homilist at all of the Sunday Masses (= end of April); 3.) when I can be off of my anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxing medications (= beginning in May); and 4.) when I can get my surgical braces off and be splint-free (= October). All of these milestones were enthusiastically confirmed as I spoke with Dr. Piper.  But then I made the mistake of asking him how long he expected I would have to wear regular braces to refine my new bite pattern.  I had been thinking perhaps three more months.  In one corrective sentence, Dr. Piper broke my heart:  He predicted another year of metal in my mouth to finish the job---Lord, have mercy! So now my medical horizon of hope recedes to October 2014!  In the grand scheme of things, and certainly when compared to the suffering of countless millions, my “slight momentary affliction” (as St. Paul would put it---2 Cor 4:17a) is as nothing.  But in time it does feel like a heavy something.

I was thinking of these matters today when I was able to meet up with a good high school friend, Leo Meskis, whom I have known for twenty-seven years but have only seen perhaps three or four times since graduation.   After giving him a tour of Queen of Peace, we went to Elia’s for a great Mediterranean lunch.  Of course as we talked, time disappeared and the years melted away in memories as vividly present as yesterday.  Leo is currently in the orthotics business, traveling great distances to fit people who have very serious medical malformations of their bodies to those devices which will best relieve their pain and optimize the normal physical functioning of their lives.  My friend sees suffering on a daily basis and---in seeing solutions the patients may not see---fits people with hope.

As Leo and I reminisced, our conversation turned to a certain Priest we had as a teacher at Bishop Noll Institute.  Fr. Stephen Gibson regularly and aggressively interrupted any number of Saturday mornings of our adolescent laziness to goad us into joining him on “religious mini-field trips.”  Somehow this cleric’s gentle pushiness made it easier to accept these suburban pilgrimages than to refuse them, and one of his favorite spots to meet was a Carmelite shrine and monastery in Munster, Indiana.  The more I talked with Leo today, the more I realized that---like Abraham---Fr. Gibson saw what we didn’t see:  In the week by week, month by month spiritual formation this Priest was offering us, he saw that the Lord had a blessed and life-long mission for each of us to discover.  Clearly our teacher saw in each student of our little group at least the potential of a Priestly vocation, and in my case his sacrifices have borne precisely this fruit (Leo is happily married in Indianapolis with a beautiful wife and daughter).

For all of the Teresian Carmelite graces I have pointed out in several of these blog entries, never until today did I think of the roots of these gifts extending back through time to my half-hearted and even reluctant teenage prayers at that Carmelite monastery all those years ago.  I also mentioned to my friend Leo that I have never expressed my gratitude to Fr. Gibson for all of the unrewarded labor and countless hours of prayer he put into us as a spiritual father trying to raise good spiritual sons.  To this day we are able to imitate this Priest’s quirky speech patterns; we have only begun to imitate the confidence of his faith which emboldened him to share it in such straightforward, life-changing ways with the young and the clueless.

It gives me so much joy this night to know that the Lord Jesus Christ is not intimidated by time.  He can be patient with His adversaries---even unto death on a Cross---because He sees and accomplishes in His own Person the boundless promises made to Abraham to be fulfilled over the course of centuries and millennia into eternity.  I am not yet fifty (seven more years to go), but I can testify that today I recovered a Carmelite joy hidden for me from of old.  The weight of a quarter century was lifted by a single conversation with a good friend to reveal that the infinite happiness of my Priestly vocation was already being prepared in long-forgotten visits to a silent monastery during the time in my life when I was wearing my first set of braces, restricted to the small horizon of hoping---just hoping---that I would finally get them off for my high school senior year!  In seeing now what Fr. Gibson saw then, I am truly glad with my Father’s joy.