Dear Parish Family,

We now begin what the Church calls “Ordinary Time.” Christmas season is over, and we begin to reflect on the public ministry of Jesus in the Gospel and apply that to our personal life. From the choice of the Scripture in this week-end, I would like to invite you to think about two fundamental aspects for spiritual growth. In the First Reading, Samuel, who was still young, was woken from sleep by hearing his name called in the night. He thought that the person calling him was Eli, the old priest whom Samuel served by keeping watch on the oil lamp. But Samuel was wrong in thinking this. It was the Lord calling.

It took three times of God calling before the experienced old priest Eli tumbled to the fact that it was God who was calling Samuel. It took four times of God calling before Samuel finally answered by saying, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”

What a surprising story?  Wouldn’t you suppose that if God called you, you would know something very special had happened? Who would believe that God could call you and you wouldn’t recognize that you were having a wild, spooky, religious experience? Who would believe that you could get the voice of God confused with the voice of someone else? We get the answer to this from the experienced priest Eli. He makes us understands that you can be in direct contact with God and still not know that it is God who is talking to you.

But if God’s voice can be confused with some ordinary voice, how does Eli know, how does Samuel know, how does anyone know that it is God calling? The answer is that you can’t know until you are willing to listen. God doesn’t force monologues on the unwilling. He invites to conversation. When Samuel is ready to tell God that he is willing to listen, then the real connection between God and Samuel begins. The connection that starts with that willingness of Samuel grows into a friendship that is rightly described this way: the Lord was with Samuel. At that point, no one at all could miss the fact that it was God who had called Samuel.

And so here is what we learn from the story! The voice of God can be anywhere, in any guise. It isn’t thunder and lightning or extraordinary psychic happenings that connect a person to God. Rather, it is the willingness to listen, to trust and obey, that makes the Lord known.

In the Gospel narrative we hear about John the Baptist who sends two of his disciples to Jesus, announcing, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” The disciples ‘listen’ what he says and follow Jesus. Jesus sees them and says, “What are you looking for?” These words, note well, are the very first spoken by Jesus in this Gospel, and they are not meant to sound like the annoyed remark of a pedestrian suddenly aware that he is being followed. In this context, they form the question addressed by the Eternal Word made flesh to the heart of anyone meaning to take Jesus seriously: what, really, are you looking for in this brief life?

Their answer—“Where are you staying?”—may on the surface sound like a reference to place or residence. But in this Gospel, the thematic word translated “staying" (menein, often used for the mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Christian person) gives the question a meaning more like, “Where are you rooted? What is the source of your being and significance?” Or, as we sometimes put it in our vernacular, “Where are you coming from?”

Understood that way, Jesus’ response, “Come, and you will see,” begins to take on the depth surely intended by the author. For the deepest kind of “seeing” in this Gospel is the seeing of faith. And one gets to see in this way by accepting Jesus as the “one sent” from the Father and by being born “from above”. LISTENING and SEEING are the stepping stones for a believer to move into the realm of a deep relationship with God.

Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.