The Albums of Life

Introduction

The Road to Emmaus

The road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem leads you to the Word made flesh where you become an adorer with the magi (Mt 2:8-11). The road from Jerusalem to Jericho leads you to a man waylaid by robbers upon whose wounds you pour the oil of compassion as a Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37). The road from Jerusalem, which leads you astray into a foreign land where you squander your youth and your nonsense, changes you into a prodigal son who returns to the house of the father (Lk 15:1-32). The road today from Jerusalem, the City of Peace, to Emmaus, seven miles up the road, frees your downcast spirit from all your shattered illusions, and helps you to recognize the Lord not where you were hoping he would be, “in the redemption of Israel,” but where he truly is, “in the breaking of the bread”(Lk 24:13-35).

The road to disillusion

On the road to Emmaus Easter morning the disciples of Jesus were not singing any Easter alleluias. Our reading today says their faces were “looking downcast.” Other translations say, “Sadness was written all over their faces” or “Their faces were drawn with misery.” Their heads were drooping and shoulders were bent because they were “hoping that Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel.” Or as another translation puts it, they were “hoping he would be the glorious Messiah who was going to set Israel free from the Romans.” Instead Jesus died ingloriously on the cross. Good Friday was indeed a deep disenchantment for the disciples; it shattered all their hopes and expectations. It shattered all the their illusions.

The road to Emmaus is the road of life; it’s the journey of life on which we catch up to our illusions, or rather our illusions catch up to us. Life, in fact, is a journey of disillusionment. That might sound negative at first, but it doesn’t have to. James Carroll wrote an excellent little volume entitled Contemplation. It is one of the very few books I carry with me though life. He wrote it a good thirty years ago, and I read it again last week in preparation for your homily, and it sounded just as though it was written yesterday and was written for today. That’s what makes some books live forever. Life might be a journey of disillusionment, but, in his little volume Carroll writes, “To be disillusioned is to begin to live.”

Disillusion in the church

He wrote those words ten years after Vatican II. By then the Council was causing a great upheaval in the life of the church, shattering so many of our Roman Catholics illusions. In those days we were witnessing the “old unshatterable church” shattering on us. In those days we were watching things crumbling on us, which once were carved in stone. Yes, and by the seventies, we Catholics were witnessing the shattering even of the “great new church.” With time the period after Vatican II had degenerated into bickering about clerical garbs and religious habits. Warfares broke out over Communion in the hand or in the mouth. Many great heroes of ours left the church. The exciting liturgical changes came to bore us a bit and left us without that old sense of mystery. And the new age of "community" left us now more alone than ever before.

The reform movement of Vatican II disillusioned us Catholics, but Carroll writes, “To be disillusioned is to begin to live.” Being disillusioned calls us now to be creative and to go now in search of new paths. It summons us now to live changed lives. And for sure, to be disillusioned and thrown off our high horses, like Paul of Tarsus, sets us down a path of humility.

By now we Catholics should be experts on disillusionment. In the present crisis before the church, we are again being disillusioned, now about the hierarchy and power in the church, about priests and celibacy, and about whatever else we feel the present crisis is shattering for us. But Carroll says, “To be disillusioned is to begin to live.” Our present crisis now calls the church to be creative and to find new paths to walk. It summons the church now to live a changed life. It robs the church now of power and sets it down a path of humility.

My disillusion

Fifty years ago being ordained a priest and saying your First Mass was a super big event. You always hired a professional photographer for the occasion, no matter how poor your family was. He took shots of the highlight moments, and the best shots were encased in an expensive leathern album.

Twenty-five years after my ordination and First Mass, as I was preparing to move on to a new assignment, I stumbled upon my First Mass album. It took me by surprise. There suddenly it stood uncomfortably before me confronting me with pretenses long faded away, with old theological ideas replaced now by new and different ones, and with youthful enthusiasms now moderated by a bit of arthritis. I suppose psychologists today would call it a “middle age crisis.”

The uncomfortable album stared at me and confronted me with my shattered illusions about priesthood. Then with a bit of guilt, and when no one was looking, I performed a kind of weird Old Testament symbolism, not unlike the one which the Lord God commanded Jeremiah saying, “Take the loincloth you’re wearing around your waist, and go to the Euphrates, and there bury it in a hole in the rock” (Jer 13: 1-11). I wrapped the album in a shroud, and I secretly buried it! And there I stood without my loincloth. I buried the album because the priesthood that I had pursued as a dream in the days of my youth with its many illusions had shattered on me. It had died on me.

Be not scandalized, brothers and sisters! There’s nothing wrong in dying! “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies,” says Jesus, “it remains just a grain of wheat. But if it does fall into the ground and die, it produces much fruit” (Jn 12: 24). I buried the album because the priesthood of my youth had died on me. It had died into something different. And it had died into something better: “But if the grain of wheat does fall into the ground it produces much fruit.” I wasn’t quite sure what that “something better” was, as I still am not sure today, but I know down deep in my heart of hearts that things are better.

By the way, even God has shattered hopes and expectations, and even God gets disillusioned and disenchanted. That weird but bold bit of symbolism about Jeremiah’s loincloth ends in the 11^th verse of the 13^th chapter with Yahweh saying, “Just as a loincloth clings to a man’s waste, so I was hoping that the whole House of Judah would cling to me to be my people, my glory, my honor and my boast, but it did not.” Yahweh sounds as downcast as the disciples on the road to Emmaus: “We were hoping that he would free Israel from the Romans, but he did not.”

Your disillusion

My story of disillusion is everyone’s story. "At least once in our lifetime,” writes Oscar Wilde, “we all walk with Christ to Emmaus." My First Mass album with its shattered illusion of priesthood is no different, I suspect, from your albums with their shattered illusions, especially your wedding albums. As you leaf through them twenty-five years later, some or maybe even many of you, I suspect, sense the illusions jumping out at you, making you feel a bit uncomfortable or foolish or immature, or nostalgic, and creating in you a kind of “middle age crisis.”

The Russian poet Yetushenko, in one of his poems is witnessing a procession with the Madonna in a little Italian village. He describes the procession. Up front walk the young unmarried maidens, all attired in white, with candles in their hands, and they’re staring into the flickering flames, imagining all sorts of secret trysts with some young man of the village, and hearing his tender words. Oh, how filled they are with hope and expectation, he writes, and then he adds, “because the hour of their `undeception’ had not yet arrived.“ The hour of their shattered illusions had not yet ripened.

But in the procession behind the young girls come the married women, attired in black, heavily shuffling and, he writes, “grave and undeceived,” --- grave and disillusioned. But the poet doesn’t want you to read cynicism into his words. For he says that he walked beside the Madonna, and in the light of the burning candles, though he saw no bubbling radiance in the married women dressed in black, neither did he see weary sorrow or painful regret, but just simply that crazy mix of life which wraps both disappointment and hope into one bundle. And so Yevtoshenko sees no reason why the women dressed in black, the disillusioned ones, should have to secretly bury their wedding albums as I neurotically buried mine.

The illusions in our albums of life are not to be chalked up as mistakes or errors or time wasted or foolishness, not even as immaturity. When we act like teenagers in our teens, that’s not immaturity; that’s simply acting our age. But it is immature to act like a teenager when you are a golden jubilarian. Most of our illusions are simply the flow of life; the first rungs in the ladder of growth, every step of which is necessary. There are shortcuts to almost everything now days; there are no shortcuts to growth. And though most of our illusions are our own creations, which we lay upon ourselves, they don’t deserve endless regret which keeps them endlessly and uselessly alive. They deserve instead our forgiveness that puts them to rest, and enables us to continue to climb the ladder of growth and get on with the first day of the rest of our lives.

Conclusion

Why we assemble

“At least once in our lifetime we all walk with Christ to Emmaus.” On that road we find the Lord neither in the illusion that “he would set Israel free” nor in any of our other illusions. Rather we find the Lord “in the breaking of the bread.” That’s why we come to Eucharist every week: to find the Lord “in the breaking of the bread.” That’s why we come to the Sunday Assembly every week: to die into something better. That’s why we come to Mass every week: to be disillusioned and to begin again to live.

Sooner or later comes the day,

when downcast we trod the Emmaus Way.

Sooner or later comes the goad

that sends us on the Emmaus Road.

Sooner or later comes the day,

when the stone of illusion is rolled away,

and Angels shout and Christ bursts out

to catch us on the Emmaus Way.