Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Around dawn this morning I was praying and heard something a bit like breaking glass, some rustling. Well, I figured another raccoon or other critter rooting about. But when I left my room a few hours later, I found the seminary under “lockdown” while police – with a very intent looking dog – went in search of the intruder. A dramatic start to the day, certainly not business as usual.
Well, St. Paul tells us that “day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” One of the biggest challenges of life in this world is simply tedium, what the theologian von Balthasar called the “gray everyday.” He held that the greatest challenge of the Christian life was getting through the “gray everyday” with “faith, hope and love.” And we know, in faith, that something radically other will break into our world, in God’s good time. And God will come for us when we least expect it.
So we are to keep vigil. And – unlike me, I’m afraid – respond when we hear the sound of breaking glass. It may just be a thief in the night, as was the case here last night; it may also be the Lord, in which case we will “lift up our heads” because our Savior has come. And then we have hope that we will emerge from “this present darkness” into a light greater than any this world can know.