On Sundays, I will have a feature called Sustenance Sunday, in which I will highlight a homily from the church I attend, reading or readings for the day, or something else in a spiritual vein.
Today I attended Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Mechanicsburg, Pa. during a weekend visit to Messiah College, my alma mater. Father Chester P. Snyder was the celebrant, and during his homily, he highlighted the passage from Luke 24:13-35, where two of Jesus’ disciples meet Jesus on the road to Emmaus. On reading this passage briefly during one day last week in the course of my doing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a footnote in my Bible on verse 13 caught my eye: “Seven miles: literally,’ sixty stades.’ A stade was 607 feet. Some manuscripts read ’160 stades’ or more than eighteen miles. The exact location of Emmaus is disputed [emphasis mine].”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Fr. Snyder touched on this in homily, echoing what the Pope told pilgrims who gathered for the Regina Caeli prayer this morning. The Pope said that archaeologists cannot identify with certainty the exact location of Emmaus “suggests that Emmaus is really everywhere, the road that leads there is the path of every Christian, indeed, every human being.” Or as Fr. Snyder paraphrased Benedict: “We can’t capture Emmaus. Emmaus is everywhere.”
This really struck a chord with me, because during my journey through the Spiritual Exercises, a theme which has been recurring is finding Jesus, God, through all the circumstances of life and through the people I encounter. As I was explaining to a student at an “official” dinner at Messiah College, it is not that I believe that the table at which we were sitting is God or that animals are God or that even people are God or gods, but that…
(Although as Christians, especially Catholic Christians, I believe we can be transformed into reflecting God — as St. John of the Cross writes about the soul that is united in love with God in “The Living Flame of Love” that “appears to be God.”
In this state the soul is like the crystal that is clear and pure; the more degrees of light it receives, the greater concentration of light there is in it, and this enlightenment continues to such a degree that at last it attains a point at which the light is centred in it with such copiousness that it comes to appear to be wholly light, and cannot be distinguished from the light, for it is enlightened to the greatest possible extent and thus appears to be light itself.”)
…it is that we can encounter God in the circumstances and in the people we least expect, if we are open to seeing Him. And sometimes it might be in the most difficult of circumstances and/or the most difficult of people that we see Him or at least a part of Him or something that He is trying to teach us. Too often, though like the two disciples, or even like Mary Magdalene in John 20:14, or the disciples in John 21:4, we don’t realize it’s God that is there at first. May we all be as blessed as all of them were blessed to finally be able to recognize God where He is least expected.
