Spent a few hours yesterday helping set up for Sausage Supper.
My task for much of that time was to hang netting – along with a couple of fellow parishioners – in the Games & Booths area. One of my co-workers I’ve known for years (and in fact he was one of my Golf League teammates this past season.) The other, I met only yesterday morning – though he, too, has been in the parish for quite a while.
We did a marvelous job, the three of us, if I do say so myself.
Alas, much of what we did…we later undid…when we learned that netting was required on only a few (not all) of the Game booths. But that’s another story.
The morning’s most notable accomplishment – net-net – was fellowship, I think: among the three of us, and among the dozens of other volunteers who invested their time and talent to transform one of our parking lots into a community gathering space.
Later in the day, I returned for a second shift of volunteer duty…at the Sausage Wrap. And there I discovered two dozen more parishioners, most of them different than the folks I’d worked with on the morning shift…many of them from our Latino community.
Net-net: another gift of fellowship, this one highlighting how our parish has embraced a vibrant multi-cultural grace of late, one that I never would have expected back when we joined St. Joe’s some 40 years ago.
It was not lost on me that I was in some sense experiencing synodality in that moment. We were journeying together, accompanying each other, parishioners new and old, Spanish- and English-speaking, working hand-in-hand – to help fashion the fiesta of fellowship that will take place on our parish grounds later today.
“Synodality” is not just for festivals of course. It’s fuel for every moment, for every one of our steps along The Way. I think Cardinal-elect Timothy Radcliffe OP had something like this in mind when he opened the third session of the Synod on Synodality in Rome with these words this week:
“Let us imagine a net. A net consists of empty holes linked by ropes, spaces, and bonds. Without both, there wouldn’t be a net to haul in the fish.
When cultures meet, as they do in this Synod every day, we should treasure the space between them. Neither should devour the other.”
This process – of bond-building, of mutual respect, of strength in solidarity – is hard work. It can seem impossible, in part because the space between us seems so vast at times.
Perhaps that’s why the Lord reminds us in this week’s gospel story not to rely entirely on our own resources. Net-net, he has something important to show Peter (and surely all of us as well):
Jesus looked at them and said, “For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God.”
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 