A Reflection for Wednesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
What does it mean to be a faith spanning the globe, not tied to a particular people but meant for all? From my vantage point of spending the first couple of weeks of the Synod’s final meeting in Rome, it means being chaotic, beautiful, contradictory, ancient and—paradoxically—always renewed.
This is nothing new. While that doesn’t minimize the messiness, it reminds us that we’ve been here many times before—and perhaps something exciting is about to break into our history.
Christianity has been wrestling with this from the beginning. Pope Francis emphasized during the Mass that opened the Synod that “the Lord places in our hands the history, dreams and hopes of a great people. They are our sisters and brothers scattered throughout the world, inspired by the same faith, moved by the same desire for holiness.”
Are we, though?
I was sitting in the congregation, listening as Pope Francis preached this homily under a sky as perfect as a Renaissance painting. As I looked around at the hundreds of people that filled St. Peter’s Square, sameness was not what I saw. There were the two young women with brightly dyed hair and tattoos just in front, an elderly Asian couple to my right, and brightly dressed African women just beyond. Most of them spoke no Italian or Latin, and those were the languages of the liturgy and the music. Pope Francis preached in Italian; people tuned out. Hardly anyone could pray.
There’s a tension here that has no easy solution.
For instance, today’s reading from the Letter to the Ephesians is about opening up the faith to the Gentiles, “who are co-heirs, members of the same Body, and co-partners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” We see the early church struggling with what to do as it became more and more obvious that the Gospel was not meant for one community, but for all communities. How does something that difficult happen?
A glimpse of Rome today, with its idealistic pull toward oneness crashing into the reality of overwhelming diversity reveals that we need to rethink some things. The early church did, why not us? Along with opening up to multiple peoples, the early church had to deal with the passage of time. They had been certain Jesus would return during their lifetimes, but as the passage from Luke reveals, their certainty about that had also become a question mark. When would the master return? How could they be prepared?
The Scriptures reveal a people wrestling with uncertainty, precarity—reality. So must we. Perhaps we have learned that one size does not fit all, that we can be cleansed in the same waters of baptism and yet be radically different peoples. During the Second Vatican Council, some theologians rejoiced that we were finally becoming a global Church, not just a European one. We began praying in our languages, singing our music, respecting each other’s uniqueness. Vatican II invited us to the threshold of realizing that differences were beautiful and enriching, yet 60 years hence, we still seem to want to cling to a sameness that could only be true for the first generation of Christians, and then, even not for them.
The good news is that the messiness of the three years of the Synod is teaching us to listen, and by listening to figure out how to get better at navigating our differences. A few days after that opening Mass, I gathered with a group of pilgrims in one of the most ancient churches of Rome. The Mass was celebrated in English. I ‘whisper translated’ for Sister Laura Vicuña of the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon. She speaks Portuguese and Spanish, I speak English and Spanish – so that third language would do the work. As I asked her to tell me what she needed translated she said wisely, “the homily… the rest of our liturgy, it is the same for us all.”
A global church needs this kind of trust, to know there are things we will share, others that we must struggle with, and still others that we will never share. We need to not only be okay with that, but to celebrate it. I’ve been learning Italian to be in Rome, yet, when I met with Pope Francis, his humor and joy were in Spanish. There’s nothing like hearing your own language and being with your own people. As the Synod concludes, may one of its findings be that difference is beautiful and wrestling with newness is worth it.
