2nd Sunday in Lent

My homily for this Sunday:

A little boy, around the turn of the 20th century, lived some way out of town. He had reached the age of 12 and had never, in all his life, seen a circus.

You can imagine his excitement when a poster went up at school that on the next Saturday a travelling circus was coming to the nearby town. He ran home with the glad news, and then came the question: “Dad, Mum, can I go?”

The family was poor, but the father sensed how important this was to the boy, so he said, “If you do your chores ahead of time, I’ll see to it that you have the money to go.”

Come Saturday morning the chores were done and the boy stood ready in his best clothes by the breakfast table. His father reached down into his overalls and pulled out a pound note, the most money the boy had ever had at one time and gave it to him. After the usual cautions about being careful the boy was sent on his way.

The boy was so excited that his feet barely touched the ground all the way to the town. When he got there, he noticed people were lining the streets, and he worked his way through the crowd until he could see what was going on. There in the distance approached the spectacle of a circus parade. It was the grandest thing that the lad had ever seen. There were exotic animals in cages and bands and dwarves, acrobats, and all that goes to make up a great circus.

After everything had passed by where he was standing, a circus clown, with floppy shoes and baggy paints and brightly painted face, came by bringing up the rear. As the clown passed by where he was standing, the boy reached into his pocket and got out that precious pound note. Handing the money to the clown, the boy then turned around and went home.

The mistake that the boy made is the same mistake we can make in our spiritual lives — we can end up settling for less than the real thing, for a portion instead of for the whole, and all because we either don’t believe in what God can do, or because we don’t look at or understand what we have been given: “I did not know what it was, so I threw it away.”

I believe the most common problem faced by many Christians is not the fact that they spend too much time seeking spiritual visions and revelations, thereby neglecting the important truths and duties of everyday life in Christ; rather, it is the fact that they do not believe in, and thus, are not open to, the special moments, the special touches, that only God can give.

Some of the faithful say that people have no energy for living the Christian life because they do not get fed by the church. I say some people are out of energy because they fail to recognise the food that is before them, because they fail to take and eat what God seeks to give them.

So, when did you miss the last meal God gave you?