December 21, 2014
Dear Parishioners,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon You and the power of the most high will cover you with its shadow.”
I have a long time priest friend who recently ran a marathon. His name is Rich. And for those of you who don’t know, a marathon is a running race of twenty-six and one-third miles. and is different from other races for two reasons. First, because it’s a lot longer than most races. And second, because most of the runners don’t actually want to win it; the great majority are happy just to get through it in one piece.
Rich is in his late fifties and has never been in a marathon before, and so I asked him why he had made a decision to run one at this point in his life. He said that it all started when he got involved with a project to raise money for sick children in the Amazon. These were principally children who had been born with serious problems in their hearts that needed operations to fix them; operations that are not available in the Amazon. The children had to be sent to Brazil or Trinidad and it was very expensive. The government was not paying, so the families had to do their best to try to raise money for them. Rich had gone to see one of the children in the hospital and he had been touched to the bottom of his heart by the sight of the little child in the incubator struggling desperately just to breathe, and he wanted to do something to help. Someone suggested that he should do a sponsored run, where people donate money for you to run a particular distance for a good cause. So they set him up to run this marathon and, listening foolishly to their suggestion, he agreed. But before he did it, he thought he should first try it out to see what it was like. So he went for a little run and he got about two miles before he had to stop, because he was panting and wheezing. Suddenly he realized that running twenty-six and one-third miles is actually quite hard work. So he started to train for the marathon, and for about three months he got to the stage where he thought he could just about do it.
Then day of the marathon came and it was very, very hot. Many of the runners who had been entered dropped out because they did not want to run on such a hot day. But Rich was determined, he had made his mind up, he had made a promise, and he wasn’t going to let anybody down.
He told me that if he had been running for himself, he would have stopped after the first mile; because he was exhausted. After ten miles, he was in more pain then he had ever experienced in his life, and all he could think about was his legs and how much they hurt, he wanted to stop or to die, and really didn’t care which as long as it was soon! And then, something very odd happened. He got an image in his mind of that baby lying in the incubator panting for breath even harder than he was just to stay alive. And he discovered that, so long as he had that image in his mind, his legs didn’t hurt. But when he thought about anything else, his legs hurt really bad! And so he focused as hard as he could on that image of that baby. And he said later, “once I was thinking of that, even twenty-six miles didn’t seem so far”.
I think that is what happens when “The Holy Spirit comes upon you and the power of the most high covers you with its shadow. “You get the power to focus on something other than your own hurts. You get the insight to see that actually, you are not the center of the universe. You get the compassion to feel someone else’s suffering. And most of all, you get the strength to do something about it.
Let us pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit in our own lives; that we too, like Mary, may be given the responsibility of bringing God into the world.
Fr. Leonard+