After the amazing blessings of the last eight days I am compelled to revisit my blog and share these graces with you. Last Sunday I left St. Thomas Aquinas as one of two chaperones for eight beautiful young women as we departed for a week of Prayer and Action in South Hutch. The week was one of untold and innumerable blessings. One of the most striking though came Thursday night during the retreat portion of the half mission trip, half retreat day. During praise and worship I was pulling a David Walker and praying clutching my TEC cross in my hand. We were singing Empty Me and at the part where the lyrics are "empty me, empty me, Fill won't you fill me with more of you and less of me" I opened my hand which had been clinging to the TEC cross. I realized in that moment that God was calling me to surrender that community to Him, this Framily that I've become a part of. For me this was even more difficult than the invitation I received the previous night in adoration to surrender myself more fully to His will. Its was one thing to desire that He should increase in my life and I should decrease but the full implication hit me on Thursday when I realized this meant being willing to give up these wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ that I have come to cherish so much. I don't know whether God intends to keep them only for a time before giving them back or whether it is more permanent but I know that my hands need to be empty to go where He has called me in Rome.
It struck me in a new way though on Wednesday night in adoration why separation is so difficult. As humans created in God's image we are made for communion, first of all with Him but also through Him all men. Thus when we form holy friendships centered in Christ we share a part of ourselves with the other and form a kind of unity. When we are separated we keenly sense how unnatural this is. But I'm reassured by the knowledge that communion is also our telos, our end if you will. Heaven will be the eternal communion; separation, a result of the fall, will be no more. However, even in the this mortal life though we are offered the opportunity to have a taste of this eternal union in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar, the Eucharist. Christ truly present in the appearance of bread and wine offers us His whole self. This communion with Christ is also a communion with the entire body of the Church, both those still on earth and those in heaven, thus the logic behind one of my favorite sayings, "See you in the Eucharist."
In the face of my nearing departure for Rome and the invitation to give these brothers and sisters in Christ back to God I have been blessed in the last few weeks to meet so many new framily members. This makes the sense of separation more painful but also all the more sweet. At this point I give them to our Momma Mary. May she keep all of you in her mantle and until, in God's time, we meet again. Until then, See you in the Eucharist.
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