If Jesus is the vine and we are the branches, how do we abide in him? How does he abide in us? Those are good questions for us to ask ourselves on our journey of faith. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been trying to read more. I have trying to read some classic novels, some of which I have read before, some of which I am reading for the first time. I just finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. Right now I am reading Crime and Punishment by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. When I was a missionary, I had the chance to read some of those long novels that require a lot of time. Melville’s Moby Dick was one of those novels I had a chance to read. Most people remember the short three word sentence that is one of the most famous opening lines of a novel in American literature: “Call me Ishmael.” Later in the book, there is an interesting quote about a Polynesian island that the crew comes upon. Ishmael states: “It is not down in any map; true places never are." One aspect of our journey through life is our physical journey. However, we also have our internal journey of faith, our spiritual journey. As Catholics, we are called to take in all of the externals of our journey and process them in our faith in the depths of the soul. Sometimes it is easier to concentrate on the externals and to ignore that faith places where we go. Perhaps those true places on our journey are those places that are marked in the spiritual realm, not the material earthly realm. On our faith journey, may we go beyond our time and our efforts, take time to abide in Christ and to listen to him.
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