Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B Second Reading (Alternative)

Doesn’t the word “falling” sometimes describe our lives? Falling into debt, falling out of belief, falling from blazing temperatures, falling from the pandemic …?

The First Reading talks about a time like this.

God had pulled his people out of ancient captivity by sending them on a 40-year “exodus” from the Egypt of that day. In this terrible journey and blazing heat of those days, things indeed had begun to fall apart. The freed people began to grouse and censure Moses and Aaron, their leaders. They actually said that they would rather have stayed in the land of Egypt and be killed … than to starve now, wandering, through the dessert.

How do we face the falling of their world and ours?

Maybe these words of Anne Lammott hold a key:

When a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born … and this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.

In the Exodus, something very big and lovely was trying to be born. God was holding their “falling to pieces” gently all the while. He even sent a huge flock of quail for meat as well as

“bread from heaven” (manna) from the skies. …

God has sent the manna, God sends Jesus, the true manna. Maybe God had distracted them (and us?) by the falling of his people?

There is a poem my Reiner Maria Rilke, the German poet, which may apply here. If you will indulge me, I will quote my translation of it.

Autumn

The Leaves are falling, falling as from afar,

as if from some far-off garden in the sky.

They fall with gestures of denial.

And in the nights the heavy earth falls

out of all the stars in the loneliness.

We all fall. This hand, here, falls.

And look at the rest: it is in all!

And yet, there is one who holds all this falling,

endlessly softly, in his hands.

Maybe our warming, careening earth, our bumbling human affairs, and everything that is falling apart, all of it, even the planet earth, has behind it something big and lovely trying to get itself born.

There really is no other true answer to the falling of our world and of our planet, no answer at all unless supporting hands make safe the falling and support it with tenderness, since …

Something lovely might just be being born.

The Words of John Foley.