18 June 2020
Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Father Elijah: An Apocalypse is a best-selling novel by Michael O’Brien. It tells the story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor named David Schäfer who converts to Catholicism, becomes a Carmelite priest, and takes the name Father Elijah. The young David Schafer was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust through the self-sacrifice of a Catholic man, Pawel Tarnowski. After the war, he moved to Israel and became a reputable lawyer involved in the trial of Adolf Eichmaan. He was also a happily married man. Then, one day, a bomb exploded in a marketplace. His wife, Ruth, and their unborn child were killed David was near despair. The pursuit of power gave him something to strive for. He rose through the political ranks and later became a minister in the Israeli cabinet. He was destined to be the next Prime Minister of Israel. However, while he was on a speaking tour in New York, he received a message from an angel of the Lord that changed his life. He was delivered from despair by an encounter with Christ, which eventually moved him toward a religious life as Carmelite priest. Fast forward, an elderly David Schäfer, now Father Elijah, was pottering around the garden of the Carmelite monastery on Mount Carmel when he received a call to travel to Rome to receive a special mission from the Pope. The fictional pope tasks Father Elijah with a secret mission: to confront the Antichrist, bring him to repentance, and thus postpone the Great Tribulation.
In looking back at my life journey, I must say that my personal story is similar, but of course quite different, to the story of Father Elijah. I grew up under the military dictatorship in Indonesia. The discrimination and the bad treatment that I received under the military regime made a deep scar in my heart. When I was in college, I lost my faith because I believed that God did not love me and He did not care about the world because He let injustice prevail. I was involved in a student movement against the military regime because I believed at that time that the struggle against injustice would be the solution to redeem the world. I graduated from the top law school in Indonesia. After the fall of military regime, I became the youngest commissioner in the Indonesian Election Commission. I was engaged to a young woman after seven years of dating. My world turned upside down when I moved to the US, which initially was for the purpose of pursuing my graduate studies. After attending a retreat with an Indonesian Catholic young adult group in Seattle, I finally felt God’s love within me and I realized that Jesus was calling me as His friend. This conversion eventually compelled me to join the religious life and I was ordained a priest. After my first ordination anniversary, I received a new mission to go to Rome so as to start teaching at the Pontifical Gregorian University.
My life story is different than the fictional story of Father Elijah and certainly I am not Father Elijah. But, there is one thing that inspired me from the story of Father Elijah. He had an affinity to the character of the Prophet Elijah. The story from the Book Sirach that we hear in the first reading today contains the summary of the life and ministry of the Prophet Elijah. There is an episode of the life of the Prophet Elijah that we often miss, which is his restoration and his commissioning. After all, after fighting the prophet Baal and confronting King Ahab, Elijah thought the primary means of reaching the people was to display God’s power in dramatic and spectacular ways. But, when he failed to see the results that he expected, he was shattered. God restored Elijah in several ways. First, Elijah fell asleep out of exhaustion. This sleep and rest are part of God’s providence because God knows our frailty and He is mindful of the limits of our physical bodies. God’s providence works through an angel who provided a special instruction to Elijah. Twice he is told to eat and drink, and twice the angels allowed him to sleep. After God restores his physical strength, he restores Elijah’s spirit. At Mount Horeb, the Lord ignored Elijah’s self-justification and any reason for doing sensational works. God gives a special instruction to come out of the cave and stand before the Lord. God speaks with Elijah in a quiet and low voice and gives Elijah the lesson that God rejects Elijah’s human strategy for showing spectacular power because God does not always operate that way. In the end, God re-commissions Elijah to anoint Jehu as king of Israel and Elisha as his successor.
As I prepare to embark on my new mission in the Eternal city, the story of the prophet Elijah gives me a lesson (and hopefully to all of you). Our human strategy, often times, does not work because we may not realize that our strategy is a substitute for God’s strategy. Most of the time, we should let God be God and let God work mysteriously with His strategy.