Hope

What a joy it was to meet my new nephew, Luke! I always feel younger than my age because of my work with children and young people and the contact I have with my own nephews and nieces. Children bring us such joy and such hope for the future, don’t they?

Unfortunately, we travel through life with our own age cohort for the most part. Schools tend to segregate us by age. Then, we go off to college, another world apart. Our social lives continue this trend more or less, until we reach retirement and find places to live with other retirees. As senior citizens, we may end our time on this earth segregated again in a nursing home or alone at home. Although it is never this clear cut, the broad lines are there. We don’t live like other societies where the generations freely interact and live together. Too bad! Intergenerational interaction shouldn’t be limited to those who are fortunate enough to have nearby children, nieces and nephews, and grandchildren of their own. We are all enriched when the various generations live together without unnecessary barriers. This is what it means to be a human family.

Jesus interacted with people of all ages. He said, “Let the children come to me” (Matt. 19:14) when his apostles tried to keep them away. On the other end of the spectrum, he understood the grief and loneliness that older members of society sometimes feel. In today’s Gospel, Jesus encounters the widow of Nain who was in the throes of grief over the loss of her only son. How alone she must have felt! Could anyone really understand her pain? And how vulnerable she might be in that particular culture having no man to support her! Like Elijah before him, Jesus understood and was moved with compassion. He touched the coffin and said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!” And the young man, like Lazarus, came back to life and was reunited with his mother.

The story touches me because I know a lot of mothers and fathers who have lost children. A sister-in-law has had miscarriages. A couple at the school where I taught had a son die on the football field and then, almost five years later, another son die in a lake, both of cardiac incidents. We all know far too many parents who have lost kids to car crashes, overdoses, and suicide. As we just celebrated Memorial Day, we collectively remembered those who sacrificed for the love of liberty and the defense of our country. When I read about Elijah’s prayer being answered to raise the dead, or about Jesus restoring life to a widow’s son, I sometimes think, why not now? Why not still? The pain is as deep as ever, and we need the compassion of God!

Unlike Elijah and Jesus, I think we more often feel helpless in the face of tragedy. We are like the rescue worker who tried to save a refugee girl from drowning but was unsuccessful. He brought the girl’s life jacket to Pope Francis, who used it in his catechesis with children. “He brought me this jacket,” the pontiff said, showing the life jacket to the children, “and with tears in his eyes he said to me, ‘Father, I couldn’t do it – there was a little girl on the waves, and I did all I could, but I couldn’t save her: only her life vest was left.’”

What, then, do we make of the stories in the Bible? We know that an encounter with Jesus can restore life to the body (the widow’s son) and to the soul (the conversion of St. Paul). What we must also realize is that encountering Jesus is encountering the very reign of God. It is eschatological. Miracles are signs of a future that Christ has unfailingly ushered in, but that we must work for and await with faith, hope, and love. As Gabriel Marcel reminds us, “Jesus is a memory of the future.” What he has done, he will do. Others felt the power of the Reign of God. We will feel it as well. “At nightfall, weeping enters in,” said the psalmist, but we await the morning, for there is, “with the dawn, rejoicing.” On that day, we too will say, “You have turned my mourning into dancing… forever will I give thanks.” We read the Bible wrong when we think it is only about the past. It is, rather, a window into the future which gives us, in the present, that most powerful gift in the face of tragedy: Hope.