Allelujah!! He is (still) Risen!!
Our readings for this Sunday, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, the Resurrection of the Lord are here.
These are the poems, my notes, and interpretations of Fr Dennis’ homily on April 28, 2013, unknown which Sunday Mass time at St Mary’s (St. Mary Student Parish in Ann Arbor).
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The poem Fr Dennis references in 2013 is:
- March 26, 1974 (R. Frost 100th birthday) by Richard Wilbur
In 2013, we reflected on —
- The Cycle C gospel reading is again brief.
- From the second reading taken from the Book of Revelation, D2 found engaging the declaration from the throne “‘Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race.'” I (Rainey) find this simple statement powerfully resonant in St Gregory of Naziansus’ oratory in which he declared humans are most made in God’s image when we love humans, particularly when we love the poor.
- D2 (aka Fr Dennis Dillon, SJ) paired Revelation’s “‘Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race'” with the Gospel’s “As I have loved you” to create the understanding that we are created/made to give, and we know this when we are giving. But we can become locked or marooned into a “not-giving” state of doing … or being.
- In a quote from Alice Waters, one of the prime forces of the farm-to-table food movement in the United States and noted chef, author, and restaurateur, D2 shared a simple and ordinary practice of this love, when Ms. Waters wrote:
- Our full humanity is contingent on our hospitality: we can be complete only when we are giving something away; when we sit at the table and pass the peas to the person next to us we see that person in a whole new way.
- The poem by Richard Wilbur is written in commemoration of what would have been Robert Frost’s 100th birthday and in a Frost-like style. Wilbur uses a rhyming couplet with iambic meter, mostly octameter. D2 found that the final four lines of the poem capture that gentle sense of God’s call, of when we really listen and are released from those places of “not-giving” …
- So that the freeze was coming out,
- As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
- Relaxes into mother-wit.
- Flowers, I said, will come of it.
The Surest Sign 