By Pastor Parris
Merry Monday it is!
“For you bring me a continual revelation of resurrection life, the path to the bliss that brings me face- to- face with you.”Psalms 16:11 (a precious song engraved in gold)
“labyrinth; a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.”a labyrinth of passages and secret chambers”
Augustine said; “If the pleasantness of the journey and the very movement of the vehicles were to delight us and turn us aside to enjoy the things which we ought, instead, merely to use, and were to confuse us by false pleasure, we would be unwilling to end our journey quickly and would be alienated from the land whose pleasantness would make us really happy.”
It’s Passion week and if anyone was on a journey or a series of passages it would be the Christ. He was “on the way”or in the “crucible of change”. Whose face does Jesus see in the crowd as he walks his Golgotha? Psalm 16:5 says “you are my prize, my pleasure and my portion!” Let’s walk with him on the road of surrender. Facing ahead will be a labyrinth of passages and secret chambers along the way.
Katharine Drexel who founded Xavier University in New Orleans said: “Out of our common todays and yesterdays we are building for eternity. No thought, no work of ours ever dies. We shall meet them all again, and in the world to come shall find our gathered harvest. The moments of our lives slip past us like water through our fingers, but the love of God in our hearts is able to imbue them with a tinge of eternity. Using things with charity gives us an inheritance in Heaven, one we do not see now but which will be waiting for us when we arrive. Where our treasure is, there also will our heart be.”
This week lets us all dig in a little further into our path, we become a wayfarer bound for our eternal homeland. Home is the place of belonging, of comfort, of love, of knowing and being known, of sharing life together. On the way is a place of loneliness, of alienation and of constant labor. Our treasure in heaven requires us to use this world as a means to journey to Heaven, not as an end in itself.
Let me close with a little more of Augustine; “So my brothers, let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labors. You should sing as wayfarers do—sing, but continue your journey. … If you make progress, you will be continuing your journey, but be sure that your progress is in virtue, true faith, and right living. Sing then—but keep going.”
See you along the path to the bliss!