Pentecost Sunday, reflecting on the second reading at evening prayer with the brothers
"Crappy" is exactly how our brother Dan described his mood to me one early morning in Postulancy. I had just woken up and was on my way down the hall to the bathroom when I ran into Dan scrubbing the nearby carpet. "Mornin' Dan, how ya doing?" I asked. Dan didn't respond in bad spirits when he replied "crappy." He was literally cleaning up an accident from of our older friars that had so unfortunately gone unnoticed and tracked through the carpeted hall.
Now, this was not the first nor the last time I would find Dan cleaning one of these accidents. But Dan was always on top of it without a word of complaint spoken. I can picture Dan now, scrubbing away as Paul reminds the Corinthians today that the Spirit of God makes us all into "one Body."
Being embodied is amazing! A body eats, dreams, runs, plays. But a body also defecates, grows old, gets sick, dies. Being a body can sometimes feel uncomfortable.
But I think this is what Paul is encouraging us to acknowledge, that the body that we are, the body of Christ, is made of parts we're not always comfortable with, that we wish we didn't have, parts that make us squeamish or disgusted.
As Paul says "The Body is Jew and Greek, free persons and slaves."
And so that image of our brother Dan, lovingly following a messy trail, challenges me this Pentecost. Am I willing to meet others at their level, in the crappy mess of their lives? Can I acknowledge the Unity of the Spirit at work even there? And may that same Spirit be ours.
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