In Search of Something MoreRead Time 9 min

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Isaiah 66:18-21
Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13
Luke 13:22-30

It is all a bit of Isaiahan imagery from this Sunday’s first scripture, these Thursday summer night gatherings in downtown Milwaukee’s Cathedral Square. They are billed as “Jazz in the Park,” and folks come from all directions. Isaiah had said they would come on horses and chariots and carts, only these days they are by car and by bike, by bus and by foot. Blacks and Anglos and Latinos and Asians, a sort of gathering of the nations. Though Isaiah said they would come called to the mountain of God, on these nights the people come for the music.

Still, I can’t help thinking of Isaiah’s promise and the Gospel’s foretelling as people stream into Cathedral Square, coming from the north and the south and the east and the west. Couples holding hands and couples who seem to have given up doing so. Young adults scattered upon blankets amid cheese and wine and laughter. Oldsters who bring tables and candles and glass goblets and gingham checkered picnic baskets. Singles who come to meet someone. Others to pass the time. And still others, like me, to simply watch their neighbors. For some the music is why they come, that their souls might be stirred or maybe just distracted from the day’s burdens. For others, it seems, the music is but the occasion — to meet friends or make friends or perhaps simply to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Yet each comes in search of something more, hoping that they might pass through the door that opens into that something, if only for a summer evening.[1]

At one time or another we all have the sense that life could be more than what it is. This Sunday’s Gospel urges us to walk through the narrow door if indeed we do want to discover that more. Yet it’s fair to wonder what such narrow doors might look like amid all the comings and goings of our lives.

For some of us it may be that we have accumulated too much baggage that’ll never fit through the door. So we’re faced with some letting go — of stuff lest we be preoccupied with constant worrying over it all, or of hurts we like to nurse and hold on to, or of fears that will endlessly darken any doorstep.

For some of us narrow doors seem to be too much like back doors, service doors that quite naturally presume we will be doing something menial or demanding or just plain too much like hard work. It’s the much wider front door that ushers us into being special, we think.

For some of us narrow doors suggest narrow rooms and hallways on the other side of the door, a life of constricting limits when what we really want is to have it all.

Yet if we are honest, we know that somewhere along the way we have come to suspect that the stuff we’ve accumulated does get in the way of being free to embrace what we really want. And that the only way to become special is to do the difficult thing of treating another as special. And that to accept the life one has, as narrow and limiting as it might seem, is too often the only door that ever seems to open for us.

In the end, the narrow door through which we must walk is often the door we would not choose or even the door from which we would run. Nevertheless, it is the wisdom of Jesus that says if you and I want to find life, we must be willing to lose it. And if we are not willing to lose the life to which we cling, then you and I will never find the life we really seek.

Perhaps that is why the Gospel suggests that once any door is passed by, then that door is locked. In time, then, we find the master of that house where once we could have found life saying to us, “I do not know where you are from, depart from me.” It all suggests that whenever we stand before a narrow door of life, the choice we make does shape our lives and our future. Life, we come to realize, allows for no turning back. Centuries after Jesus, the poet Robert Frost echoed that same wisdom and mused, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”[2]

Both time and grace do move on, locking the past in what might have been. So, then, it is only by entering the narrow door before us today that we can ever know the master of life who lives there.

Questions for reflection:

• What is the narrow door through which you need to pass at this time in your life?
• Read this Sunday’s portion of the Letter to the Hebrews. In what ways have you been or are you being disciplined?

1 Richard J. Sklba and Joseph J. Juknialis, Easter Fire (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016), 9.

2 Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston), 105.