Reflection on the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

1 Samuel 3 1 Corinthians 6 John 1

One sentence in the reading from Samuel caught my attention: “At that time Samuel was not familiar with God because God had not revealed anything to him as yet.”  The sentence made me think about my earliest days, as a child and in the novitiate, just starting to become “familiar with God.”  How familiar have I become with God since those early days?  And how has it happened, how is it happening still?

When I was in my 40s, I had had it with religious books — what we used to call spiritual reading — books that wrote about God in declarative sentences, like “As we know from St. Thomas, God is eternal.“ A statement like that seemed so cerebral, cold blooded, the opposite of the familiarity that one develops with a friend or in a family. I told God that I was through with studying religious books and if God wanted me to know more, God would have to show me through my daily life. That was one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments.  Within a few years, I became aware that my life was running downhill, out of control, and I was powerless to stop it.  I was dying, and I needed a lot of human help.  Most important, though, I needed to surrender to God’s loving power in my life. In the process, I’ve become more familiar with God.

  The passage from Corinthians seems to highlight and clarify just how I’ve been getting familiar with God. St. Paul says, “… our bodies are members of Christ … joined to Christ, becoming one Spirit with Christ.”  Paul suggests that our bodies are the training grounds for familiarity with God, our bodies are both the means and the repository of our growing familiarity with God.  

The dictionary says the Latin roots of “familiar” mean domestic, intimate; close relationship as in a domestic or intimate relationship.

Whatever our circumstances, it is through our bodies, our bodily experiences and limitations, that we develop familiarity with God.  How and what we feel and think, how and with whom we relate, how we engage our energies and for what — it is through all these physical ways of being God touches us, draws us, teaches us, challenges us and reveals God’s own self to us.  In all these ways in all the moments of our lives, God inspires, “in spirits” us as an abiding presence within us.  All this is ours because we are bodily persons.  

The story in today’s Gospel follows in the same line, because everything is really the same story:  St. John’s passage lets us hear Godly Love speaking in the voice of the Baptist, inspiring two curious men to follow Jesus, the very embodiment of God.  Jesus notices them following and turns to ask what they’re looking for — a simple, human question answered by their equally simple, human question: “Where are you staying?”  Human beings, bodied persons, follow and look, ask and answer questions in human voices and have places where they stay; all these ways of living in our bodies are the means by which we become familiar with God and God is revealed and becomes familiar with us.

Taken together, this morning’s readings affirm again the message of Christmas, the amazing truth of God made flesh: God’s most familiar presence with us, revealed in and by our very bodies and in the bodies of our companions, in all that physically surrounds us. The abiding presence of Love is revealed over and over and over, throughout a world which appears steeped in sorrow, suffering, cruelty and death. For those becoming familiar with God, Love is in it all.