A Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent
Readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12 Luke 13:1-9
What if you missed your burning bush? Could there be a better, clearer entrance of God into human life? Moses sees a bush, burning yet unconsumed. He draws near, and God addresses him, entering his life with plans so complete that they constitute a new identity.
Is that not the Holy Grail of the spiritual life? God makes himself known and, in doing so, we discover our very selves! Who has not longed for such an entrance, looked for the day when the ways of God would be explained, made self-evident?
But what if you missed your burning bush? You passed by, the bush flamed, but you did not draw near, did not ask what God had to say?
Let the burning bush represent any liminal moment, any time of great disturbance, immense change, one neither sought nor expected: a death, a disease, a divorce, a departure. Did the bush burn without you asking why? Did God enter your life only to find you too distracted to respond?
We typically do not encounter God in a way that cancels all doubts, quiets every question. And there is a reason for that. God does not desire to enter our lives in a manner that would drain them of freedom, of our own initiative. So, typically, we will not see a bush burning but unconsumed. Instead, we espy a small flame, smell a bit of smoke, rest a while in a flickering light.
But what if you missed that as well when it happened? Then you go back. Life is not truly lived, at least not in grace, until we relive it in memory. It often takes time to see what was there all along. Perhaps that is why Eddie Dupuy, a friend from my Roman seminary days, has recently written an autobiography, titled Recollections on a Road Between (2024).
Eddie “left the seminary.” It is an ominous phrase. Carries a whiff of failure much like the phrases left the marriage, left his family, left her career. But no exodus, no liberation, can begin without taking one’s leave!
Eddie opens his memoir with a deeply philosophical insight.
If it is true that a pattern of one’s life emerges in its telling, then the truth of life and clues to its meaning depend not just on verifiable facts, but on memory and how memory evolves into narrative—a “re-membering” or a “re-collecting” of passing time into the passages of a story.
This beautiful memoir is not a story of regret. Eddie met the proverbial “love of his life” in his wife Jan and raised three children with her. He became a literature professor and then a college administrator.
Eddie’s not going back to any burning bush in regret. No, he is ruminating, drawing deeper insights from memory. Perhaps that is why he subtitled his autobiography A Story of My Life. Using the definite article would suggest that his life has only one meaning, that the narrative is narrow. The indefinite article suggests that this book is only one journey into time and memory, for, as long as we live, our stories continue to be written, and each vignette, each event takes its meaning from an ending that is still being composed.
I have learned something from Eddie’s story, and not simply because our paths once converged. No, it is in the nature of good art. The artist sees something, shares something that the rest of us immediately recognize. It belongs to the artist and to us. It is part of our common humanity, our divine inheritance.
So, what if you missed your burning bush? Then I say, so what if you missed your burning bush! The bush still burns in memory. The great task of a graced life is to bind together the disparate moments of our lives into narrative, into a story of purpose and direction. Sometimes that requires our return, in memory, to days long past.
I am not saying that recollection can remove tragedies or restore losses. No, even in memory, as Shakespeare once put it in a famous sonnet,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Yet we go back in recollection to gather what we missed at the time. When collected into a narrative, the individual moments of our lives live again.
Memory constantly bestows new meaning. Put another way, what something once meant is not the last word about what it means now, what it might someday mean.
When Shakespeare went “to the sessions of sweet silent thought” he still grieved “the lack of many a thing I sought” but in the end he found a presence awaiting him there, revealing itself to him in memory.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.
That’s who Jesus can be for us—with grace, will be for us—the one who gathers us together into ourselves, into him.
When our Lord is queried about a common memory, the horrific death of Galilean zealots at the hands of Herod, he redirects the question, bringing it back to those who posed it, asking them to look again.
Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way
they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?
By no means!
But I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did! (Lk 13:2)
Christ then asks what it means to be fruitful. Are we bearing fruit? Is our story purposeful? Will it someday be part of the kingdom’s great narrative of grace?
Would that we could answer that question once and for all! But more bushes must burn, and we must draw near to hear the word of God more than once. Still, we only move forward when we can also go backward, when we can return in memory and retrieve something of God’s will, something we missed the first time around. That is, if we are granted the grace we call memory.
Eddie likens writing his story to a search for his own self. After all, the self is the one thing we do not discover in the world. We must find the self through engagement with the world, and that is not accomplished once for all. No, much of who we are, who we were meant to be in the Lord, is constructed in memory.
