May 7, 2018
Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter
John 15:26-16:4
We are always forgetting. We are always falling away.
Yesterday morning I walked up the driveway for the paper and there was a beautiful rain falling on the new green leaves and everything smelled fresh and clean and there was this lovely coolness in the air. Then I came back in and started reading an article praising a couple of writers I know and I was filled with envy. Stabbed by it. This resentment rose in me. This wounded pride.
Just a few seconds after the rain.
This happens all the time. “I have told you this,” Jesus says in the gospel today, “so that when [the] hour comes you may remember.” But we don’t. It’s not that God doesn’t exist and the Spirit doesn’t move but that the Spirit moves again and again, and for brief moments we feel it moving and we believe, and then we immediately let the moment slip away. We don’t think about it again.
“Do this in memory of me,” Jesus said at the Last Supper, and we hear the priest say again every mass, and that’s why we come. We come to remember: the beautiful rain, the new green leaves.