March 12/13
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031322.cfm
Three weeks ago, a group of more than twenty St. Agnes and six Good Shepherd parishioners visited Christ the King parish on 44th Street in our city’s West End. Christ the King is one of four predominately Black Catholic parishes in our city. Our visit was a continuation of a program called “Moving Towards Oneness” that partnered several of our parishioners with others from Christ the King and Good Shepherd this year.
During Lent we are called to go unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable places and to respond, in the words of our Lenten theme for this year, “I must go.” Last week, the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the desert. This week the Holy Spirit appears in a stranger guise—a bright cloud that overwhelms the three disciples, Peter, James, and John, that accompany Jesus to the top of Mt. Tabor.
The journey to Christ the King did not have as many pyrotechnics, but the Holy Spirit was there. Christ the King is a beautiful and historic brick church with a stunning exterior. It is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its interior is decorated with striking wood paneling and many images and statues of Black saints, a Black Holy Family and Madonna with Child. Most prominent is a large crucifix, similar in size to ours here at St Agnes. Christ is Black and wearing an orange, black, and green kente patterned loin cloth. Their parish is looking forward to its centennial in 2028. That’s the same year St. Agnes will celebrate the centennial of this church building.
If you’ve ever been to a predominately Black church before, you know that the preaching and the singing are highlights. This was true at Christ the King three weeks ago. Like us, their choir has not fully rebounded from Covid, but nevertheless their cantor and electric organ player were rousing.
I have described several differences in the art, environment, music, and worship from St. Agnes. Despite these elements, the mass is the same. Black Catholics are Catholics. And the liturgy follows the same pattern of the Universal Church familiar to any and every Catholic in our worldwide communion. We are all children of Abraham, heirs to the promise that God made in Genesis. We are as numerous as the stars in the sky, and as rich in diversity as those celestial bodies. Like Peter, John and James, we are called to the mountaintop, where our bodies, Black, brown and white, will be transfigured and glorified in light.
At Communion at Christ the King, we sang a familiar song, “One Bread, One Body.” It reminds us that, in the Eucharist, we are brought into communion, into oneness: “And we, though many, throughout the earth, we are one body in this one Lord.”
That song and that image of the Body of Christ are very hopeful. But we do live in a world that is deeply divided. We separate ourselves by race, by language, by our political party, and increasingly by our political and cultural tribes. This is not how we are intended to be.
We see that even God Himself, the Trinity is a community of persons. We have an incredible Trinitarian image on Mt. Tabor in the Transfiguration today. Jesus is radiant white. The Holy Spirit is the bright cloud. And God the Father a voice from the cloud. I want to sit with that cloud, the image of the Holy Spirit for a moment.
A bright cloud passes over the three Apostles and they fall asleep. Neither their eyes nor minds are fully prepared to accept the reality and glory of the Trinity. They are scared and confused and shut down. The bright cloud on Mt. Tabor here is sometimes called, “The Cloud of Unknowing. It can represent our dream of separateness as human peoples—torn apart by the Tower of Babel.
During Lent, we are called to enter into this bright cloud. To let the Trinity penetrate our mind and our eyes and transform the way we see ourselves and each other. To awake from our dream of separateness. Sometimes the sun is so bright it can seem like darkness, paradoxically. We can’t stand it.
Next week, the woman at the well will marvel that Jesus, “told me everything that I had ever done.” Not just her own collective sins, but the sins of the Samaritan people. Her encounter with Jesus and her cooperation with his grace would lead that whole people to repentance, conversion, and transformation. We are given that same call.
In an effort to ‘move towards oneness,’ St. Agnes is going to continue to visit other parishes this year and to invite them to come here. I encourage you to participate in these visits and to welcome our visitors. Additionally, our racial solidarity group, the Sister Thea Bowman Society, offers monthly programs so that we can grow in solidarity, justice, and unity. Please consider participating.
The story of Abraham shows that God can do impossible things. He can make an elderly, infertile couple the father and mother of a nation, the instruments of his covenant, and the people by whom the world comes to know the one true God. God can also bring us to reconciliation and oneness despite the legacy of slavery and racism. He can end the horrific war in Ukraine. He can transfigure us and resurrect our bodies. In Genesis, we heard a verse that St. Paul’s considered the key to the entire Torah. “Abram put his faith in the LORD, who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.” Let us put our faith in the LORD this Lent as we too say, “I must go,” and enter into the cloud of unknowing.
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"For the first time you [lift your heart to God with stirrings of love], you will find only a darkness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing [...] Whatever you do, this darkness and the cloud are between you and your God, and hold you back from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing him in the sweetness of love in your feelings. [...] And so prepare to remain in this darkness as long as you can, always begging for him you love; for if you are ever to feel or see him...it must always be in this cloud and this darkness."
— The Cloud of Unknowing
and Other Works. Translated by A. C. Spearing. London: Penguin. 2001. pp.
22. ISBN 0-14-044762-8.
I learned after I gave this homily that my grandfather went to Christ the King grade school (now closed) for first grade and received by First Communion and Confirmation at the church as a first grader. His family moved to the east end of the city following the great flood of 1937. Many other white Catholics left the west end of the city after integration in the 60s (a phenomenon called white flight).
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