(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://www.kofc3970.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Mass-Blog-for-the-19th-Sunday-of-Ordinary-Time-2024.mp3)
A journey can be exhausting—even if it’s a vacation. Kelley’s Island is an oasis among Lake Erie’s touristy vacation spots. Rent a golf cart and stray from the periphery of this island, and eventually you’ll transition from crowded intersections and State Park attractions down a more lonesome road.
One long stretch of asphalt is festooned by a canopy of trees, sheltering hot and exhausted escapees from the summer sun’s burning rays. It’s like a natural hallway to heaven. Suitably, it leads to an off-road shrine honoring Jesus’ mother Mary.
The shrine is filled with prayer messages left by this island’s more tired and troubled tourists. Hundreds of little bits of paper, glittery rocks, wood carvings, and ornaments carry messages with one prayer in common: “Mary, please put in a good word for me with your son for the sake of my troubled, ill or departed loved one.”
These intercession seekers long for relief, as Elijah does in Sunday’s first reading (1 Kgs 19:4-8). He’s just made deadly enemies among God’s enemies—those who scorn his very existence. Elijah finds relief under the shade of a broom tree not unlike those offering shelter to Mary’s weary Kelley’s Island visitors.
Elijah came to a broom tree and sat beneath it. He prayed for death saying: “This is enough, O LORD! Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” He lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree, but then an angel touched him and ordered him to get up and eat. Elijah looked and there at his head was a hearth cake and a jug of water. … Then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.
Kelley’s Island visitors have the opportunity to leave this off-road shrine a little less burdened, and maybe with a little more compassion for their fellow travelers. That’s especially true if they take time to read the cares other shrine visitors left at Mary’s feet. They may even amend their own prayers with some of those. The result might be to feel like an Ephesian—at least those taking Paul’s advice in this Sunday’s second reading (Eph 4:30—5:2):
All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.
Forgiveness is the living bread that nourishes humanity as delivered through Mary’s Son—on-demand, as-needed. Her giving birth to humanity’s Savior brought both mother and son down to earth, making them more approachable.
But for some people, familiarity breeds contempt, and as Sunday’s gospel reading shows (Jn 6:41-51), Jesus’s contemporaries couldn’t swallow his identification as God’s answer to humanity’s prayers.
They murmured about Jesus because he said, “I AM the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
I AM is God’s name. Bread of Heaven is God’s answer to our prayers. Mary’s answer was the act of becoming the living ark of the covenant keeping us fed. Let’s be like Elijah and those Kelley’s Island sojourners who found peace and comfort at a tree-sheltered oasis and left there with a lifetime of sustenance to share with others.
–Tom Andel
There are many illustrations of how people hunger for relationship with their Creator and Redeemer. Prayer is the natural first step. Being nourished by our Lord in the Eucharist is the only food that can satisfy.
May we all be witnesses to the essential purpose of life: unity with our Lord, now and forever more!
This shrine backs you up on that, Thomas. It proves there’s no vacation from our search for The Divine.