Living Gospel Inclusivity and Empowerment Now
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“The purest form of spirituality is to find God in what is right in front of you.” Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, 29-31.
Welcome
to Free Spirit Inclusive Catholic Community on this third Sunday after Easter. Today we remember the meeting of two disciples with the Risen Christ as they walk along the way to the town of Emmaus.
Opening Meditation: Gentle music, calms the nervous system and pleases the soul - healing music for the heart and blood - YouTube (play about 3 minutes)
Opening Prayer: (Jan) Abba, Creator of the material universe, you gave us your Son Jesus, to be humanity’s light so that we might walk in that light, walk as he walked, and to use his light to find you in all the ordinary circumstances of our lives; to recognize you in the other and to experience your presence in all of creation. Open our eyes that we might see. Loosen the bonds of our biases and our ignorance that we may walk the path that lies ahead of us in this time and place. ALL: Amen
Opening Song: Life is a journey not a Destination by Sabrina Maria
First Reading: (Mark) Excerpts from: Whatever the Problem, It’s Best Solved by Walking, Andrew McCarthy, New York Times, 3/26/2023
Walking is the worst-kept secret I know. Its rewards hide under every step. Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole befit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There’s something else at play in walking that interests me more….
Hippocrates proclaimed that “walking is man’s best medicine.” The good doctor also knew that walking provided more than mere physical benefits when he suggested: “If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk.” He was alluding to what so many who came after would attest, that walking not only nourishes the body but also soothes the mind while it burns off tension and makes our troubles recede into a more manageable perspective.
But walking does more than keep the devil from the door. …. Walking buoys the spirits in a way that feels real and earned. It feels owned.
There’s abundant testimony that a good ramble fuels creativity. William Wordsworth swore by walking, as did Virginia Woolf. So did William Blake. Thomas Mann assured us, “Thoughts come clearly while one walks.” J.K. Rowling observed that there is “nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas,” while the turn-of-the 20th-century novelist Elizabeth von Arnim concluded that walking “is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.”
And ask any deep thinker about the benefits of what Bill Bryson calls the “tranquil tedium walking elicits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted, “There is something about walking that animates and activates my ideas.” Even the resolutely pessimistic Friedrich Nietzsche had to give it up for a good saunter when he allowed, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
Instead of viewing walking as simply the slowest way to get somewhere, I grew to see it not only as a means to an end, but as the event itself. I’ve come to understand walking as among the most valuable things I can do.
The writer Rebecca Solnit pointed out that walking “is how the body measures itself against the earth.” And through such physical communion, walking offers up its crowning gift by bringing us emotionally, even spiritually, home to ourselves. For these profound and encouraging words we say, “may we ever more come home to ourselves, amen, amen, amen!”
Second Reading: (Christina) From the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Third Sunday after Easter
April 23, 2023
The Walk to Emmaus
“The purest form of spirituality is to find God in what is right in front of you.” Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, 29-31.
( ) Welcome
to Free Spirit Inclusive Catholic Community on this third Sunday after Easter. Today we remember the meeting of two disciples with the Risen Christ as they walk along the way to the town of Emmaus.
Opening Meditation: Gentle music, calms the nervous system and pleases the soul - healing music for the heart and blood - YouTube (play about 3 minutes)
Opening Prayer: (Jan) Abba, Creator of the material universe, you gave us your Son Jesus, to be humanity’s light so that we might walk in that light, walk as he walked, and to use his light to find you in all the ordinary circumstances of our lives; to recognize you in the other and to experience your presence in all of creation. Open our eyes that we might see. Loosen the bonds of our biases and our ignorance that we may walk the path that lies ahead of us in this time and place. ALL: Amen
Opening Song: Life is a journey not a Destination by Sabrina Maria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4LDf_9eYml
First Reading: (Mark) Excerpts from: Whatever the Problem, It’s Best Solved by Walking, Andrew McCarthy, New York Times, 3/26/2023
Walking is the worst-kept secret I know. Its rewards hide under every step. Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole befit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There’s something else at play in walking that interests me more….
Hippocrates proclaimed that “walking is man’s best medicine.” The good doctor also knew that walking provided more than mere physical benefits when he suggested: “If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk.” He was alluding to what so many who came after would attest, that walking not only nourishes the body but also soothes the mind while it burns off tension and makes our troubles recede into a more manageable perspective.
But walking does more than keep the devil from the door. …. Walking buoys the spirits in a way that feels real and earned. It feels owned.
There’s abundant testimony that a good ramble fuels creativity. William Wordsworth swore by walking, as did Virginia Woolf. So did William Blake. Thomas Mann assured us, “Thoughts come clearly while one walks.” J.K. Rowling observed that there is “nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas,” while the turn-of-the 20th-century novelist Elizabeth von Arnim concluded that walking “is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.”
And ask any deep thinker about the benefits of what Bill Bryson calls the “tranquil tedium walking elicits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted, “There is something about walking that animates and activates my ideas.” Even the resolutely pessimistic Friedrich Nietzsche had to give it up for a good saunter when he allowed, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
Instead of viewing walking as simply the slowest way to get somewhere, I grew to see it not only as a means to an end, but as the event itself. I’ve come to understand walking as among the most valuable things I can do.
The writer Rebecca Solnit pointed out that walking “is how the body measures itself against the earth.” And through such physical communion, walking offers up its crowning gift by bringing us emotionally, even spiritually, home to ourselves. For these profound and encouraging words we say, “may we ever more come home to ourselves, amen, amen, amen!”
Second Reading: (Christina) From the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are most impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability-and that it may take a very long time.
And so, I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually-let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that (God’s) hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. For the life and witness of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we say thanks be to God.
Composite Psalm: (Individually read by the community in spontaneous fashion)
We walk by faith not by sight. (2Cor: 5:7)
Listen here, people; God has already made abundantly clear what “good” is, and what YHWH needs from you: simply do justice, love kindness, and humbly walk with your God. (Micah 6:8)
You shall walk in all the way that the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you. (Deuteronomy 5:33)
Thus says the Lord of hosts: If you will walk in my ways and keep my charge, …I will give you the right of access among those who are standing here. (Zechariah 3:7)
Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him. (Colossians 2:6)
Whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. (1John 2:5-6
For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord., Walk as children of light. (Ephesians 5:8)
And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people. (Leviticus 26:12)
When Abram was 99 years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty, walk before me, and be blameless. Genesis 17:1)
Anyone who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. (1 John 2:6)
Alleluia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ty7dBgmKw1w (Mass of Creation)
Gospel: (Elaine) Luke 24:13-35
That same day, two of the disciples were making their way to a village called Emmaus-which was about seven miles from Jerusalem-discussing all that had happened as they went.
While they were discussing these things, Jesus approached and began to walk along with them, though they were kept from recognizing Jesus, who asked them, “what are you two discussing as you go your way. They stopped and looked sad. One of them, Cleopas by name, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who doesn’t know the things that have happened these past few days?”
Jesus said to them, “What things?”
They said, “About Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet powerful in word and deed in the eyes of God and all the people-how our chief priests and leaders delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him. We were hoping that he was the One who would set Israel free. Besides all this, today-the third day since these things happened-some women of our group have just brought us some astonishing news. They were at the tomb before dawn and didn’t find the body’ they returned and informed us that they had seen a vision of angels, who declared that Jesus was alive. Some of our number went to the tomb and found it to be just as the women said, but they didn’t find Jesus.
Maureen: Then Jesus said to them, “What little sense you have. How slow you are to believe all that the prophets have announced. Didn’t the Messiah have to undergo all this to enter into glory? Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted for them every passage of scripture which referred to the Messiah. By now they were near the village they were going to, and Jesus appeared to going further. But they said eagerly, “Stay with us. It’s nearly evening-the day is practically over. So, the savior went in and stayed with them.
After sitting down with them to eat, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, then broke the bread and began to distribute it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus, who immediately vanished from their sight.
They said to one another, “Weren’t our hearts burning inside us as this one talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us? They got up immediately and returned to Jerusalem, where they found the and the rest of the company assembled. They were greeted with “Christ has risen! It’s true! Jesus has appeared to Simon! Then the travelers recounted what had happened on the road, and how they had come to know Jesus in the breaking of the bread. For this beautiful story from Luke’s gospel we say, “Christ has risen, it is true!”
Homily: Barbara and Community
Walking on two feet is the first quality that distinguishes us from all other animals on the planet. Bipedalism separates us from all the other great apes in our family line. It is a distinctive characteristic that frees our hands to carry things from place to place, to create tools and works of art. The ability to walk on two feet was a fuel-efficient way for our early human ancestors to populate the entire planet. We are the only species to achieve that feat.
Our first reading speaks to the rewards of walking beyond fitness: the improvement of mood and soothing of the soul, the incentive for creativity, the activation of ideas. The author, Andrew McCarthy (New York Times, 3/26/2023), Whatever the Problem, Its Best Solved by Walking) concludes that he came to see walking “as an event in itself,” an event he deemed valuable.
Culturally speaking, walking is often a part of rites of passage that require individuals or certain cohorts to go off on a journey to prove themselves. The aboriginal peoples of Australia go on “walkabout”: they spontaneously leave their community for the unknown, they leave their familiar surroundings and comforts behind for an undesignated period of time. Indigenous peoples around the world employ rites of passage, as do we but in less dramatic ways. Salvation history is rife with sacred journeys: Abraham and Sarah leaving Ur, the Exodus, the Babylonian captivity and return to Jerusalem. The annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem and to Mecca, the Camino de Santiago are just some examples of the integral significance of walking in the spiritual domain.
From an anthropological point of view, I would like to suggest that at all these walks can be seen as a specific kind of ritual, known as rites of passage. Most importantly, I’d like to suggest that these rites of passage are analogous to both our personal and communal spiritual journeys. Rites of passage share certain notable features: a person begins the ritual as one kind of person and by the time the ritual is over, they have been transformed into a different kind of person. These rituals are comprised of certain definitive stages (a separation from normal time – as when we go off on retreat), a period of transition that is marked by ambiguity, rolelessness, perceived danger, and in the final stage the person engaged in the ritual is reintroduced into society in his or her transformed state.
In the second reading, Teilhard speaks of the slow work of God. He reminds us that we are impatient, wanting to skip the stages of our on-going passage on the way to something new, something as yet unknown. Teilhard reminds us that only God can say what this new spirit, gradually forming within us as individuals or as a community, can be. Teilhard, who was a world-renowned anthropologist, is describing our on-going spiritual development in terms of a rite of passage as well as our communal rite of passage into a transformed church.
There is something more to be said from the point of view of anthropology that pertains, I think, to the heart of our gospel reading. According to authors Schultz and Lavenda in their text, Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition (2012): “Ritual is an action with a text. The performance cannot be separated from its text; text and performance shape each other. Through the ritual performance, the ideas of the culture become concrete, take on a form, and give direction to the gaze of participants. Ritual performance can serve as a commentary on the text to the extent of transforming the text itself.” Is this not what happened to our two walkers to Emmaus? It was in the performance of the ritual (the breaking of the bread) that they received direction, insight, a sense of meaning that enabled them to walk back to Jerusalem. They had been through their own rite of passage on that walk where they struggled with their experience and came out transformed.
Let me summarize: the Emmaus story is our story. The story of our ongoing rite of passage, which is our transformation over time into the Christ Mystery. This transformation takes place in stages, which we would often prefer to skip over, but life moves forward only if we keep walking. The Emmaus story is also our story because of the centrality of the Eucharist in our communal life. It has particular significance as the ritual center of our walk to become a new and transformed church.
Barbara Glatthorn (MA, MSW)
Free Spirit Inclusive Catholic Community
Greenville, North Carolina
4/23/2023
Suggested Reflection: What has your journey been like?
Liz Prayers of the Community
Sue prays for healing for Matt, and for strength and peace for his family.
Maureen prays for her sister Barbara to be comforted as she deals with the negative progression of her cancer. The side effects from her a-fib meds have stopped her cancer meds.
Elaine prays for healing in her family and they be open to the help they need.
Ann prays thanksgiving for all the people who made Greenville’s Earth Day celebration the beautiful expression of love that it was.
Ann prays for the march in Raleigh tomorrow to be safe, well attended and love fueled.
Jan asks for healing of her knee.
Tessa asks for Prayers for Madelyn who is suffering with 3 blood cancers. She now fears a return of a benign tumor in her ear. Praying that her ear is fine and she initiates an ear doctor visit to learn more about her symptoms.
Holy God, for these and all the unspoken needs of the world, for all the longings of human hearts, we pray in the name of Jesus, our brother and exemplar along the way. ALL: Amen
Liturgy of the Eucharist
Presider 1 (Ann): With open hearts and hands let us pray our Eucharistic prayer in one voice:
All 1: O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us as we set our hearts on walking with you. Wherever we go, may our deep connection to you guide us along the way. You know our limitations and our essential goodness and you love us as we are. You beckon us along the way and we rely on your constant companioning along the journey which is uniquely ours.
Presider 2 (Barbara): Guiding Spirit, when we encounter opposing forces and are conflicted, inspire us to choose wisely and make decisions that that benefit all and light the way for others.
We thank you for our brother, Jesus, and for all our sisters and brothers who have walked this way before us and have modeled a way to live and love in challenging times. Inspired by them, we choose life over death, we choose to be light in these dark times of our own making.
Presider 1 (Ann): Please extend your hands in blessing.
Sue: All 2: We are ever aware of your Spirit in us and among us at this Eucharistic table and we are grateful for this bread and wine which reminds us of our call to be the body of Christ in the world.
Presider 2: On the night before he faced his own death, Jesus sat at the table with his companions and reminded them of all he had taught them, and to fix that memory clearly with them he bent down and washed their feet.
All 2 continues: When he returned to his place at the table, he lifted the bread, spoke the blessing, broke the bread and offered it to them saying: Take and eat this is my very self.
Then he took the cup of the covenant, spoke the grace, and offered it to them saying:
Take and drink. Whenever you remember me like this, I am among you.
Presider 2 (Barbara): Holy One, your transforming energy is within us and we join our hearts with all who are walking along your path of transformation to be co-creators of a just and sustainable world that is home to all. Strengthen us for the journey ahead, enable us to listen to the directives of the Spirit, Source of all Wisdom, and guide our steps as we walk with Jesus our Brother.
Presiders 1 & 2 (Ann & Barbara): (Lift the bread and wine) This is the Body of Christ for the Body of Christ.
Presiders 1 & 2: (break the bread) while everyone proclaims: We share this bread and cup to proclaim and live the gospel of justice and peace. We choose to live justly, love tenderly, and walk with integrity.
(Pass bread and cup)
Please receive communion saying: I am/you are the Body of Christ for the Body of Christ
Play this while we are passing the plate and cup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk9lH5QWxrM&list=PL3L9c-fwcOAGz_PoSp8VmF-uIO_-Kl9R0&index=2
Communion Song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=k37UYXDyWcc
Announcements:
Tomorrow: 530pm, PPC March in Raleigh-let me know if you want to go 7pm zoom meeting EC Interfaith prayers for peace and justice
This Wednesday at 630pm is the zoom FCNL conversation on interrupting gun violence
Next Sunday, April 30 our theme will be Earth Day and we will bump up our start time to 430pm so folks can attend the concert at Oakmont Church. To prepare for an enriching liturgy please review Richard Rohr’s mediations for this past week which were on the prayer of lament. Lynn is the main composer for this liturgy which is sure to be powerfully moving
Liturgy Committee meets this Friday, 4/28 at 10am, please pray we listen fully to Spirit Divine.
Closing Prayer – Presider 2 (Barbara) We pray through Jesus, who walked this earth just as we do. He walked in challenging times. He prayed and asked for Divine guidance just as we do. He followed the path which was as uncertain as the one before us. With that awareness, we end our liturgy today with the words of Thomas Merton:
All 1: My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
All 2: I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Mark First Reader: Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
Christina Second Reader: But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
Elaine Gospel Reader: And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
Ann Presider 1: I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
All 1: And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.
All 2: Therefore, I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
Barbara Presider 2: I will not fear for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Closing Song: What a journey this has been by Salonga https://youtu.be/zqVwhrWBzEM
