Br. Jack Crowley

Luke 12:32-40

Two summers ago, my Brother Lain and I went backpacking through the White Mountains. Now if you know anything about the White Mountains, you know they are beautiful and they are humbling. We experienced both.

On our last night of backpacking, it rained. It was not a gentle mist. It was a loud, thick rain. It gave new meaning to the experience of soaking in mother nature.

As I went to bed that night inside my tent on my inflatable sleeping pad, I fell asleep to that wonderful sound of heavy rain hitting every inch of my tent. I was safe, I was comfortable, and I slept soundly…until about 2:30 in the morning when a weird noise woke me up. The noise sounded like air escaping. Pssssssssss.

I was so tired from hiking and groggy from sleeping so deeply, it took me several seconds to realize that I was flat on my back against the hard wood tent platform. My inflatable sleeping pad had sprung a leak!

I panicked and spent the next twenty minutes trying to find the leak in hopes of maybe being able to patch it, but in the confines of my small tent with rain pounding all around me, I failed. I laid back down and felt my back get even damper with a mixture of sweat and the condensation on the tent floor. Suddenly, I wasn’t so warm and comfortable any more. I knew I had about three hours until sunrise. It was raining too hard to go outside, so literally there was nothing I could do. I was utterly powerless. The only thing I could do was wait and be ready for sunrise.

The strangest thing about that night was that I was oddly happy. There’s a thin space between powerlessness and freedom. That night in my powerlessness, I simply felt free to be ready for the dawn, and knew that being ready and waiting was the only thing I could do. I was so happy that I actually fell sound asleep and it was already sunny again by the time I woke up.

We spend a fair amount of our lives waiting in powerlessness. We wait for one thing to end and wait for another thing to begin. We wait for our problems to be solved. We wait for prayers to be answered. We wait for people to change. We wait and we hope that somehow God is intervening in the meantime.

Yet we all know that while we wait, we are rarely quiet. We dream and scheme while we wait. We plot out our lives like moves on a chess board. We say things to ourselves like once this thing ends, then my life will really begin. We strategize our moves as best we can, yet inevitably we come across powerlessness. Moments in our lives when there’s no momentum, no moves to make, and no more movies to imagine in our head.

Sometimes these pockets of powerlessness can feel suffocating. We may get desperate for action, any action, some juice to power ourselves out of this rut. We may feel pinned down and crucified by problems we face. We may think to ourselves I should do something.

In these moments of powerlessness, we focus so much on what we should do, that we often forget about what we should be. Consider for a moment if every time you asked God what you should do, you also asked God how you should you be? What if instead of focusing on doing actions in times of powerlessness, you focused on states of being, like being patient, being charitable, being forgiving, or even being joyful? What if for one day you thought more about how you should be than what you should do?

In our Gospel this morning, Jesus emphasizes this importance of being, especially the importance being ready for God. Being ready, not doing ready. Being ready for God no matter what the circumstance.

We all know what it feels like to be ready for God. We’ve all had some taste of it. It’s a feeling of sharpness, but not viciousness. It’s a feeling of clarity, but not arrogance. It’s a feeling of looseness, but certainly not dullness. To be ready for God is somewhere in the middle of us all, we all know it, we all have access to it, and it is up to us to seek it with God’s help.

Last summer, in fact exactly one year ago today,  I stood a few feet away from where I am right now and made my life vows to SSJE. I stood surrounded by my dear Brothers, with my ever growing Irish Catholic family in these seats, and I promised my life to this monastery.

The truth is that whole day was a joyful blur, I barely remember any of it. However, there was one line from my profession vows that has always stuck with me. That line was me promising “…that life profession inaugurates a lifetime of developing response.”

A lifetime of developing response. In other words, I will have the freedom and responsibility to practice being ready for God even when I feel stuck in a metaphorical tent. We all get that same freedom, to practice being ready for God even when, and maybe even especially when, it feels impossible.

One year ago when I made my life vows, I also vowed to be present at another ceremony here in this chapel. Hopefully this ceremony won’t happen until many, many summers from now. At that ceremony I will yet again be surrounded by my Brothers and will yet again have a hopefully even larger Irish Catholic family in attendance. At that ceremony I will be on my back a few feet from where I’m standing right now, hopefully resting comfortably in my casket.

We have a whole lifetime to practice being ready for God. This does not mean that our task is not urgent. The call of God is present, here, now, and even stronger in the most absurd, gory, and tragic circumstances of our world.

As Jesus so clearly said, the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. We have no idea what’s going to happen. We are utterly powerless over the future, waiting for that promised dawn. Yet somewhere in that powerlessness is inexplicable joy and somewhere in that powerlessness is inexplicable freedom. We all know it, we all feel it, and it’s up to us with God’s help to be it.