I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was 18 years old and getting ready to head off to college to start a new chapter in my life. My life plan was all figured out: I would go and live in the dorms at OSU, study technology education, hopefully meet a nice Catholic girl, get my degree, get married, teach technology and have a big Catholic family like my parents. That was MY plan. But God had other plans. I met a group of young college men at that time whose example profoundly shifted my approach to life and my faith.
Those men were living in a Catholic community of college students at Ohio State. Meeting them and seeing them pray, play, study and share life together had a huge impact on me. In them, I recognized people my own age who were living their faith in a radical way: they got up early each morning to pray together and start their day with the Lord, they prayed together at prayer meetings, before meals, before sports, and at parties at their house. These dudes were always praying! But I saw how this was an expression of their identity. Together, they were calling each other on to live Christ-centered lives.
I had grown up in a strong Catholic family. My parents did a great job raising me in the faith, teaching me how to pray and about the importance of Jesus and His Church. At a certain point, though, the faith has to become your own. This was my moment. I remember going for a walk with Andrew Kebe, the leader of the men’s household, and talking about life. We sat down somewhere and I clearly remember saying to him: “I feel like my faith has been on the backburner in my life, and I would like to make it the center.” I had the inspiration to say this because I recognized something in him and the other guys that I didn’t yet fully have: my relationship with Christ at the center.
The next four years were an incredible time of growth in my faith because I found myself transplanted from the fertile soil of my family’s faith life to the fertile soil of the community of faith with my brothers in Christ at Ohio State. With their encouragement, example and brotherhood, I was able to let go of my own plan for my life and embrace God’s call. Instead of a big, Catholic family, I would embrace the even bigger and more complicated family life of a parish. Instead of meeting a nice, Catholic girl to marry, my heart fell more and more in love with the Bride of Christ, the Church. Rather than teaching technology, I began to thirst to teach others about the faith which I had come to know and love more deeply; to teach them about Jesus.
It has been the joy of my life to embrace the vocation of priesthood. That wouldn’t have happened for me without the communities of faith I grew in both at home and in college. It is no surprise that this happened. This is how the Lord has always planned it. He hasn’t called any of us to Himself alone, but with other people.
Think about the call of Moses in the first reading this Sunday. Even before the Lord reveals His name and His nature to Moses as the I AM who is the foundation of being, God tells Abraham: I am the God of your fathers, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” God is telling Moses that He is the God of his family: the ancestors whom God had worked with throughout time. God has always worked through communities, going all the way back to that first couple. Remember, something was missing for Adam before he saw Eve, his bride, for the first time. Only then did he say, “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” God never calls us alone. He has made us for Himself and calls us to Himself not individually, but together. It is in communion with others that we are drawn into communion with God. This is why, over and over throughout the Bible, God creates covenants with humanity through bigger and bigger communities of persons: first a couple in Adam and Eve, then a family with Noah, a tribe with Abraham, a nation with David, and finally, the whole human family with Jesus Himself!
So, brothers and sisters, I’m sorry to tell you, but the message this Sunday is that you are…DIRT. No offense, but you are! We all are! What does Jesus say in His parable in the Gospel? The owner of the fig tree comes to the gardener and complains that he isn’t getting any figs from the tree, it hasn’t borne fruit in three years. What does the gardener tell him? Give me another year and I will cultivate the soil around it. Brothers and sisters, we are called to be that well-cultivated soil for each other. We are called to be those people so filled with Jesus that people around us think, “Whatever those people have, I want it!” That’s exactly the way it was for me with the community of young men who drew me in at Ohio State. Allowing the Lord to cultivate our hearts in holiness together is supremely attractive. Holiness attracts. And when we allow the Lord to bring us together in holiness, then others will be able to flower by being planted in the midst of us. We are the soil!
So this is our challenge. How can we let Christ work deeply in our hearts together as brothers and sisters in this parish? He wants us, more and more, to be a community which attracts others, where people who come here say, “What is it with these St. Peter people? I want some of that!” Because when they say that, whether consciously or unconsciously, they are thirsting for Jesus. The more Jesus becomes the center for us together, the more we will be the soil where many can bloom, grow, and become part of that rich soil for others. Let’s look for those ways the Lord wants to cultivate our hearts together during this blessed season of Lent. Ask the Lord: “Who can I grow with here at the parish and how are you calling us to grow in You?”
+ Heavenly Father, thank you for inviting us to grow together in your Son during this holy season and throughout our lives. Jesus, thank you for giving us brothers and sisters to grow with. Help us to walk together into deeper relationship with you. Holy Spirit, pour out your grace in our hearts to thirst more more deeply for that communal life centered on Jesus. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen. +