When we hear our Gospel readings each Sunday during our liturgies, we often hear the story of people of great faith. Last Sunday, we heard about a synagogue official who had faith in Jesus’ ability to cure his daughter who was at the point of death and about a woman who had suffered from hemorrhages for 12 long years who had faith that Jesus could cure her with just his touch. Yet, today, we hear Jesus bemoaning the lack of faith of the people in his native town, of those who questioned his authority and did not believe what was right before their very eyes.
Faith has been one of the obvious themes in our Sunday readings these past few weeks. Faith has been explicitly mentioned in these readings again and again. When we think about the reality of faith in our own lives, we might think about how tough it is to reconcile our faith and the values of our faith with the reality of the world today. But God indeed speaks to us in the midst of our reality. The German Jesuit priest Karl Rahner, who died in 1984, was one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century, having had a great influence on the Second Vatican Council. Rahner speaks about the mysticism that is present in our everyday lives, that our more explicit Christian faith is born in the everyday, seemingly ordinary moments that make up the majority of our days here on earth. We find God in profound, remarkable experiences, but we also find God in the ordinary aspects of life. Rahner writes: “The simple and honestly accepted everyday life contains in itself the eternal and the silent mystery, which we call God and his secret grace, especially when this life remains the everyday…Wherever people are, there they are creatures who unlock the hidden depths of reality in their free, responsible actions.” Our Catholic faith helps us recognize more explicitly the experiences we have of God. To Rahner, the prayer of our everyday lives exists in our immense longings, in the call of holiness that we hear within our souls.
Yet, sometimes the complex, confusing reality of our lives keeps us from God, from seeing him. The people of Jesus’ native town did not understand what was unfolding before their eyes. In response, they did not have the courage to continue down the road of faith. We are called to be courageous right now, to not only continue on our journey of faith, but to be witnesses to the world. Recently, I read a book about St Junipero Serra, one of my favorite saints. Serra was born on the island of Mallorca off the coast of mainland Spain in the early 18th century. His family were poor peasant farmers - they would have been the equivalent of share croppers in the Mississippi Delta. In fact, while he was growing up, there were great periods of famine on the island where large percentages of the population there died. He grew up with a strong, humble faith and became a novice in the Franciscan order as a teenager. Serra spent his early years as a Franciscan priest as a respected theologian and professor, but he felt God calling him to be a missionary, to bring the Gospel of Christ to those who had not yet received it. He traveled to Mexico on a ship, a voyage in which many of his fellow passengers died of illnesses such as scurvy. Walking on foot from the coast of Mexico to Mexico City, he got a very badly infected leg that never again healed - he was in agony and pain the rest of his life. After serving at a mission and teaching at a school in Mexico City for 18 years, at the age of 53, Serra became the head of the missions in California after the expulsion of the Jesuits. San Diego, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Carmel, San Gabriel, San Juan Capistrano, San Luis Obispo - these are some of the 13 missions that he founded before his death. The faith of this humble Franciscan, his belief in his Lord Jesus Christ, propelled him to have a huge influence on the development of the Catholic faith in our country and in the founding of the state of California. He died in 1784 at the age of 70 at Mission St Charles Borromeo in Carmel, where he is buried. Pope Francis canonized Father Serra in 2015 at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC on his visit to the United States. Pope Francis praised Serra for his mission work, for the way he sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it. Father Serra’s feast day is on July 1.
Father Serra used this motto in his work in the missions: “Always look forward and never turn back.” We are to have hope and faith in the future, knowing that whatever reality we need to face in our lives of faith, God will be there at our side. He will be there as we proclaim the Gospel to the world. May we see the way God is present to us, to the ways he calls us to the faith.
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