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A Father's Eucatastrophe

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle B
June 19/20, 2021
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062021.cfm



Good morning / afternoon, St. Agnes. Happy Father’s Day to you and a Happy Juneteenth, which is America’s second independence day, the day that we celebrate the end of slavery in our country.   This is the first year that it is an official, federal holiday.  

 

I often get asked, as the father of triplets, what it was like to find out that we were expecting the three of them.  The experience was something like what the Apostles experienced in today’s Gospel story when they realized just who was in the boat with them.  

 

Two years ago—on January 31, 2019—Kate and I went to the obstetrician [Dr. Heather Wilson] for our first pregnancy checkup.  We had found out a month before (on Christmas Day actually) that we were expecting our second child, and this felt like it would be kind of routine, in a way.  After our first child, EJ, we imaged that a second pregnancy and “second child”— as we then thought—would be no big deal.  We knew what we were doing. 

 

 After taking Kate’s vitals, we went into an exam room and she got on the exam table.  We had some standard conversation with Dr. Wilson who then brought out a simple, handheld ultrasound machine. She put a little jelly on Kate’s belly and had a look.  Her eyebrows shot up and she exclaimed, “Ooo, Twins!” 

 

And looked up at us. Before we had time to react or digest this information, she looked back at the machine.  She stopped and her jaw dropped.  “No,” she said.  “Triplets.”  I don’t remember much after that.  Kate and I found ourselves sitting in a waiting room for further tests.  She was sobbing uncontrollably.  I was laughing uncontrollably.  We were going to be the parents of triplets.  It was a catastrophe.  

 

All those expectations about knowing what we were doing; all those predictions about how easily a second child would fit into our lives—all of that was gone.  Our lives as we knew them (for Kate, for me, and for EJ our son) were over.  This was going to immediately upend our lives.  

 

It was also terrifying.  Because this was a high risk pregnancy, I was afraid of telling anyone the news for months and months. What if something happened to them?  What if something happened to Kate?  I was scared up until the point at which all three were born and the doctor pronounced the triplets—whose names are Miriam, Petra, and Maximilian—to be healthy and hale. 

 

What this experienced turned out to be was something different than a catastrophe.  In fact it was a eucatastrophe.  You may not be familiar with that inelegant word.  It was created by J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.  And it is a composite of the word catastrophe with the prefix “E-U” (pronounced ‘you’), meaning good.  He described it as “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with joy.”  It usually comes in a point in a story or in life where things seems impossibly bad, hopeless even.  And into that moment, God’s grace breaks into the world. 

 

You can see this working in our Gospel reading today.  Jesus’ disciples are facing a terrible calamity: a storm at sea. They are in immediate danger of capsizing and drowning.  This is one of the greatest fears of the Jewish people, even of experienced sailors like these former fishermen.  The sea is terrifying, uncontrollable, and chaotic with dangers both real and symbolic.   For this reason, the greatest miracles of the Hebrew Scriptures involve God demonstrating his power over mighty waters.  Think of the Great Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, turning the Nile into blood, and producing water from a rock in the desert, to name a few. This is God’s signature power, as we hear in both the Book of Job and the Psalm today.

 

And so, when Jesus commands the wind and the seas, this is no ‘ordinary’ miracle—one that a prophet or saint might perform.  Up to this point, his disciples had known that he was special. They could see it at the moment that he had called them and in the days thereafter in his preaching and teaching, his healings and exorcisms, but this was something different.  They ask in great wonder and even fear, “Who is this whom even the wind and sea obey?”  They know that only God himself can do that.  They knew that Jesus was special, but this is a different order of magnitude.  This changes everything.  In the midst of certain death comes the turn—it is a eucatastrophe—greater than they could ever imagine.  But as wonderful and terrible as the grace of God breaking into the world.  “Who is this?  How is it possible that this human being shows the power of the Almighty God?  What does this mean for me and my life?” 

 

I asked similar questions when I became the father of our oldest son, EJ, and later the triplets, Max, Miriam, and Petra.  On the day of their birth, I was alone with them in the NICU.  They were in their little incubators, looking like bright red, featherless chickens.  Kate was recovering on another floor from the incredible feat of carrying and birthing these three babies.  For the first hour of their life, I was with them there.  It was impossible to deny the reality of these new people. 

 

The life that I had lived before was over and dead.  Fatherhood was like a little resurrection.  Who I was before becoming a dad was another me, a person who I could remember, but in a life that I had left behind. Every diaper that I changed going forward.  Every load of laundry and washed dish, these were further little deaths and rebirths.  

 

You don’t have to be a father or parent (or to have a father in your life) to experience this kind of transformation. Christian discipleship is all about selflessness and dying to yourself. When we do this, we unite ourselves to Christ and his own act of sacrifice and his Father’s act of redeeming and resurrecting him.   

 

Tolkien described the resurrection of Jesus as the greatest imaginable eucatastrophe.  At a time when all seemed lost, when humanity had literally killed God, we were surprised with the greatest possible news.  That the love of God is stronger than death.  That God, the true father of us all, had defeated death and promises each of us the resurrection. Tolkien wrote that this was the greatest fairy tale ending possible, but it was ever more incredible because it was true.  

 

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“The Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy that brings tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.” (Letter 89)



 

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