St Paul’s speaks to us today in the letter to Philemon. It is the only time in our masses when we hear a reading from this letter. I bet many of us don’t really remember much about Philemon. It is by far the shortest of Paul’s letters, not even being organized in chapters, and containing only 355 words in the original Greek. What strikes me about this letter is that Paul wrote it while he was in prison himself, probably in Rome. Paul is not interested in his own safety and well-being, but rather in the well-being of the runaway slave Onesimus, who was returning to his owner, Philemon. Paul has such an interesting faith journey, as he started out being a prosecutor of Christians, wanting them to be arrested or to be killed. But after his conversion, Paul goes to great lengths to spread Christ’s Good News throughout the world, even to go to prison for the sake of the Gospel. When I was in Rome in 2010 at the Basilica of St Paul, I even got to see a piece of the chains that enslaved Paul when he was in prison. Paul became a spiritual father to so many of the faithful, nurturing them in the faith. He even calls Onesimus his spiritual son in the faith, his own very heart.
For Paul, God was not some ambiguous concept or a far away being in the heavens. Indeed, Jesus was Paul’s Lord and Savior. Jesus led Paul to faith and salvation. Like Paul, we the modern-day disciples of Christ, are on a quest for the living God. We seek out God in the reality of our lives. Unfortunately, that is not how many in our modern world see it. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once advised his sister Elizabeth to take a new path, to take risks, to go on a search through life as if no one has gone there before. Nietzsche told his sister: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to follow the truth, then seek. Many in our world see belief as being incompatible with our search for the truth just as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did. But our faith tells us that all of us are indeed on a journey through life. We are all on a quest for the Living God. God is alive in so many way in our lives, in our Church, and in our faith. In our first reading, the book of Wisdom tells us that it is hard sometimes to figure out those things within our grasp here on earth, so how do we search out those things that are from heaven? In our faith, we see Jesus as a light who illuminates our search through life, who helps us on our journey of faith, who keeps us on the right path.
One of my favorite Catholic books that I have read in recent years is Quest for the Living God by Sister Elizabeth Johnson, professor emerita from Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in New York. She explains that whereas learning all the doctrine and dogma of the Church is important, whereas going to mass each week and participating in the liturgical celebrations and the educational life of a parish community are essential to our Catholic faith, what is equally important is where we experience God in the lived experience of our daily reality. I have shared with you many times that I experienced God in my missionary work, in working with the street people and drug addicts in an inner city soup kitchen in Canada, and in serving with the people of the rain forest jungle region on the coast of Ecuador in South America. As a priest, I experience God in my daily life in so many ways here at St Jude and in my different ministries. Elizabeth Johnson’s book talks about how Hispanic Catholics experience God in a special way in their lives as the God of fiesta, through their joyful fiestas and social gathers, and through a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In reflecting upon our quest for God in our lives, in reflecting upon Paul’s own journey and how he helped and nurtured others in their own quest, the important thing to remember is that this quest continues throughout our entire lifetime. This quest is on-going and continuous. There is always so much to learn about God, so much to discover, to experience, and to celebrate in our relationship with God and on our pilgrimage through life. The more we continue our search for the living God and help each other on that search, our life of faith will be all the more richer for it.
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