(Transcript from a homily given at the Novena of Grace, St Ignatius Church, Portland, Oregon. Spring 2019)

I’d like to thank you for inviting me to participate in this Novena with you; to pray together to God, to ask humbly and boldly for our needs and our deepest desires. I ask your patience and support, as I am more comfortable in the body of the Church than on the altar.

Leaving everything is a frightening concept. Leaving everything to find everything and more is a breathtaking invitation. I am reminded of the times that I found myself leaving home and family to go to school, to start a job, to marry, each of these events taking me thousands of miles from my family. And I am reminded, and holding in my heart and my prayers, the thousands of immigrants who are walking, hoping, risking, leaving all behind in hope and faith as we pray here.

“It is a magnitude far greater than mine that calls those fleeing oppression to leave family and home, and what sustains them, I hope, is also the taking with them of love. ”

I was excited and I was anxious, and I cried when the time came to say goodbye, but I did go. Although in the moment of leaving I didn’t fully realize, I know now that what enabled me to go was what I was taking with me: all the love, all the lessons, all the Grace that my home and my mother and my father and my brothers and sisters (there were 7 of us) had given me. The other reason I could leave is that in some powerful way I was being called. It is a magnitude far greater than mine that calls those fleeing oppression to leave family and home, and what sustains them, I hope, is also the taking with them of love.

Peter was answering a call when he left everything to follow Jesus. It’s true that Peter heard the words, “Come and follow me” from Jesus, but what compelled him to act came from deep inside his heart, a profound surge of emotion and desire, not tied to rational thought, but driven by the Spirit within— a call. A call can be to something small and quiet, or to something large and disruptive. I imagine that Peter is a little at the end of his rope, after following his call, hearing all that it would take from him. His humanness is on full display as he exclaims, “What more do you want? We have already left everything and everyone to follow you!” I have felt this same emotion when things are not going my way, when the challenges keep mounting, and I turn to God, in all of my humanness and say…“Really, this too? What more do you want of me?”

And, even though Peter must have experienced some relief hearing that everything he left would be given to him hundredfold, he must have been a little apprehensive to also hear, in the midst of the good news, the word “persecutions”, the news that the first will be last and the last first.

Peter was being called both to let go and lean in, to surrender all and receive all, to be brave enough to be first and humble enough to be last, to be rewarded and persecuted, to die and to live.

I have a favorite representation of this completely human response to an overwhelming calling in the fresco by Fra Angelico of the Annunciation in the Church of San Marco in Florence, Italy. In other depictions of Mary, she looks radiant and peaceful after hearing that she will conceive a son, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to be called Jesus; in this rendering she is stunned. She holds herself close, trying to catch her breath, eyes far away, contemplating a threshold she cannot believe she is being called to cross. Like Peter, she surrenders to the call; in that moment, in the giving over of everything that has been, room is made for the arrival of everything that is to be, the arrival of grace and love, hope and salvation.

I spent the better part of 13 years in the company of nuns, fierce nuns, crazy nuns, loving nuns, brilliant nuns. I was taught to stand tall, think for myself, and believe that anything is possible. I have called on that belief many, many times throughout my life. It was from them that I first heard the concept of being called. Of course, one of the things they were asking us to listen for was a calling to the religious life. Secretly, for that call, I hoped my number wouldn’t come up (no disrespect to Joseph and the religious present), and it didn’t.

When my older brother told me he was entering the Benedictine order, I said to him, “So, you got THAT call, didn’t you?” He smiled and said, “Yes, yes, I did.” And he followed that call into the heart of Newark, New Jersey to serve the poor, the broken, and the oppressed. And, having left behind his family and home, he made room. For he did not see brokenness, his own, his students’, his city’s as a burden, he saw it as a blessing and, in this call, he was filled with joy and found a path to the kind of love that never dies.

The last time I saw the fresco of Mary stunned I had lost my mother and father, and my brother, and my dearest friend. I missed them desperately, I was full of love for them. In their lives, they had shown me how to live, how to die, and perhaps most importantly how to be brave enough to answer the call of the Spirit within, no matter the uncertainties that always lie at the threshold of being asked to follow. And at that moment, I was full of gratitude.

This then, to me, is the message of today’s reading: we will be called, if we are listening, many times throughout our lives to travel down many roads, to be open to leaving, to make commitments, to live more fully, to give more profoundly. These calls may come directly (like when Joseph called to invite me to participate in this wonderful Novena), in person, in writing, in reading, or they will arise from within our hearts. All of them have their origin in the still, small voice, the gentle whisper of God. Our reactions might be to immediately embrace the invitation or, maybe, to rail against what seems to be an impossible and difficult ask. But if we surrender, if we follow, we have been promised, not without suffering, that we receive a full measure of reward. We will know the Grace of gratitude, the Grace of finding ourselves empty of what came before, and also now full beyond measure of God’s love. We will find that we have left behind our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children, home, and fields, and we have found them again in the measure of love they gave us and in the reality that we are joined more deeply to them within the all-encompassing love of God.

Let us pray today for those literally leaving everything behind, called to a better life, traveling by foot, for those who have left so much behind that they find compassion, and love, and an answer to their deepest needs.

Let us pray for each other, asking for what we need. And then, let us listen and follow.