Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
The word “sign” is significant in Luke’s Gospel today. Life is full of signs: signs advertising products, traffic signs. Sacraments are signs. People reveal approval or disapproval through facial signs and body language. It is essential to pay attention to signs of the material and spiritual kinds and even dangerous not to do so.
Signs can speak in profound ways, requiring awareness on our part — to see what is right in front of us where God is trying to get our attention. Another word for this is sacramental awareness. Or as Ignatian spirituality would have it, “God in all things." This especially is revealed in persons who come into our lives, the greatest signs of the holy.
Autumn is a spectacular season to sharpen our sacramental awareness. Our creating God busts forth in gorgeous color everywhere and is revealed, too, in the faces we encounter day to day. Let us not miss the glory of October exploding around us, masterpieces painted for us to enjoy. Nature is a grace, a sign. Our only response is gratitude.
We might take this further by reaching out to someone who has been a sign to us in some way. If we cannot do so in person, why not a phone call, a short note, or an e-mail? An honest and sincere expression of gratitude makes ourselves, then, a sign of grace. If not possible or appropriate right now, lift them up in prayer to the God who sent them your way. You become the sign!
Humor is a sign. Great spiritual masters over time are convinced that God has a sense of humor (ever seen an aardvark?). Humor is a signal of the transparent, a sign to not take this passing world too seriously. We are only sojourning here, after all.
Students were signs to me over the years, especially if I needed to laugh at myself or stop taking myself too seriously. I recall waxing eloquently on some matter of theological significance when a student raised her hand and asked, “Is that a new sweater?” Once I passed a former student in the grocery store who sincerely asked, “How’s your class these days, Mr. Cronin? Any better?”
Signs are especially evident around coincidences. Are they simple chances or are they more than that, incidents of “God winking?” And as I now qualify as a “senior,” I am convinced that there is no such thing as mere “coincidences.”
God is often "tongue-in-cheek.” Father Don Driscoll, SJ told the story of walking through the airport in Milwaukee: “The mother of a former student rushed up to me. I had given her husband a retreat several years before. She grabbed my arm and in a loud voice said, “O, Father Driscoll, so nice to see you. I can’t tell you how much your talks helped my husband, now that he’s lost his mind!”
God winking? It was a sign, the Jesuit believed and he gave thanks even for that. He knew God was in it. O God open our eyes and ears that we might see and hear!
—Timothy J. Cronin