I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger

Daniel 1:1–6, 8–20 | Daniel 3:52–56 | Luke 21:1–4

This world is not my home.

I don’t mean this world, like the Baptist preacher intoning his neo-Gnostic gospel of rapture-us-the-heck-out-of-here-already.

I mean this world, like the first-century Jew whose radical followers had the audacious habit of saying to their Creator: “Our Father, Thy Kingdom come here. Now.” And like the 21st century artist who sings: “We’ll pray for Heaven’s floor to break: pour the brightest white on blackest space, come bleeding gloriously through the clouds and the blue, forcing one place from two…”

In the wake of the recent string of highly reported-upon violence throughout the world, I sense that most of us millennials have been feeling more intensely than ever that we are sojourners in a place that is — to say the least — not as it should be. We seem to have some sort of innate sense that the world we belong in is not this one, so characterized by hatred and destruction. We long for a promised land free from the war-game scoreboards of crazed power-addicts desperate for new highs as the old drugs fail to offer the satisfying delight they once had; away from the golden-calf economies of desperation which breed, reward, and thrive on (until their inevitable and cataclysmic implosion) all sorts of extremism.

At times we are so overwhelmed by the heavy darkness surrounding us that it becomes a captivity: forced, it seems, to speak the language of our oppressors, eat their food, learn their histories, serve in the courts of their king. From whence shall come our salvation?

The Church offers us in the passages we recite today from the living Word of the Creator a clear message that liberation unfolds even in mundane choices and tiny gifts of goodwill.

I recall one of only a few moments in my life where I felt as if God had ‘spoken’ directly to me. The situation surrounding me in the world was much as it is today and the burden of so much suffering had become not only emotionally but physically unbearable. In that moment of weakness the intimate message I felt in the depths of my heart was, “I am not asking you to fix the world, I am asking you to do what you can.”

The poor widow could not donate large sums to build homes for those desperate for shelter or fund vast relief efforts; but her offering was even more valuable in the eyes of God who saw and treasured her in her poverty.

Daniel, Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael had no control over their people falling into the hands of the Babylonian empire and had not a single possession among them; but they could control what they did and did not eat. Even something so seemingly arbitrary and private as being faithful to God by not allowing anything unclean to enter their bodies would reverberate over the following decades until the Israelites were looked upon favorably by their captors and allowed to return to the land promised to them.

This world is not my home. But I cannot wallow in my complacency, waiting to be taken to an elsewhere of my own theological invention. By offering someone sitting on the street anything I feel compelled in that moment to share, with the dignity of being looked in the eye like a human being; by refusing to stay quiet in the face of injustice; by not being wasteful; by reverently acknowledging the special presence of Jesus — the murdered God-man — in the sacrifice of the Mass even when I can’t feel it; by forgiving; by adopting an abused animal; by admitting when I’m wrong; by welcoming a stranger; by resting in silence with a grieving friend; by seeking to understand someone I disagree with; by doing any of these things out of faithful love and affection, I am a conduit through which Heaven comes crashing into the earth.

No matter how powerful the darkness, it cannot continue to exist where we choose to shine light. In a land of unbearably pervasive ugliness, we continue to inaugurate the place of beauty which is our true Home.