Seek, Grope, Find

Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter

The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything. He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.  Acts 17:24-27

But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.  John 16:13-14

Piety

A DARK WORD by Rev. Daniel Berrigan, SJ

As I walk patiently through life
poems follow close --
blind, dumb, agile, my own shadow;
the mind's dark overflow, the spill of vein
we thought red once but know now, no.

The poem called death
is unwritten yet. Some day will show
the violent last line,
the shadow rise,
a bird of omen

snatch me for its ghost.
And a hand somewhere, purposeful as God's
close like two eyes, this book.

Study

The Holy Spirit guides us toward the truth – sometimes directly and sometimes through others.  In today’s first reading, we see the Spirit at work in the words of Paul to the Athenians.  Paul deftly uses familiar expressions of Greek poets to make a connection with his audience. 

Paul also breaks down class and nationality differences – stressing that we are all connected from one – from the blood of the Christ. 

We need guides to the truth to help us make it through our seeking and groping in order to find the Lord in the world around us. 

Admittedly, the verb “grope” is not used much in the Bible.  However, Paul implies the same meaning as Isaiah and Job when the word is used in the Hebrew Bible:

Like those who are blind we grope along the wall, like people without eyes we feel our way. We stumble at midday as if at twilight, among the vigorous, we are like the dead.  (Isaiah 59:10)

They meet with darkness in the daytime, at noonday, they grope as though it were night.  Job 5:14

With a guide – the Holy Spirit, the saints, the evangelists – we are like the blind trying to find our way in a dark world without sight.

Action

The church and the world lost an important poet, prophet and peacemaker this week with the passing of the last Berrigan brother – Daniel – to the cloud of witnesses.  There he joins his brother Phil and his four other brothers, parents and sister. 

While on earth, Daniel was a guide who lit our way on the path to peace.  From the famous May 17, 1968, nonviolent action at the Catonsville, Maryland draft board, Rev. Dan Berrigan, S.J., broke down our world and tried to connect us all to the loving blood of Christ.  Whether he was beating swords into plowshares at a nuclear weapons facility or shaping young minds in college classrooms, Fr. Berrigan was a prophet for our age guiding us to seek God, even perhaps grope for a policy of nonviolence and find God (even though God remains not far from any one of us).  “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again”(Isaiah 2:4).

Fr. Berrigan took on the proverbial “powers that be” speaking the truth and witnessing love and justice.  The world is a little darker now that his light is out.  However, just as he wrestled with the machine of war, he also touched the face of God in the finite people he loved.  I only met Fr. Berrigan a few times but will never forget how he celebrated the “wedding at Cana” while witnessing the love of Art Laffin and Colleen McCarthy as they pledged their lives to each other and the community to make love, not war. 

Long before Joseph Cardinal Bernardin articulated the consistent ethic of life manifesto, Dan Berrigan lived it. Fr. James Martin wrote:  “[H]is aim was not simply peace in Indochina, but peace everywhere. A friend of everyone from Thomas Merton to Dorothy Day to Martin Sheen, and an inspiration to generations of peacemakers, Dan was also willing to be jailed for his beliefs, which were often unpopular in church circles, and sometimes even among his brother Jesuits.”  

Although the “poem called death” is now written, may we continue to spread his peaceful spirit in the world. Dan Berrigan, presente!