Touching the Moon With a Stick

Dear Friend,

When informed that the moon was thousands of miles away, the mystic, artist and poet William Blake is said to have responded: “Nonsense, I can reach up and touch it with my stick.” Admittedly, Blake was also an eccentric, but then I have a soft spot in my heart for eccentrics – partly attributable to my experience with Franciscans. 

So, there it was, that image of touching the moon with a stick, as I pondered this week’s first reading: “For this commandment that I enjoin on you today,” says Moses, “is not too mysterious and remote for you. It is not up in the sky, that you should say, ‘Who will go up in the sky to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?’” Similarly, the Gospel, the parable of the Good Samaritan, couldn’t be more down to earth. Both Moses and Jesus are talking about the summons of the Lord to love God and to love our neighbor with all our heart and soul.  

Then we have Saint Paul’s words (second reading) which N.T. Wright calls a “mystery-revealing poem that offers a glimpse of another world, a truer world than the violent and brutish world of paganism, then and now.” Paul and his friends, says Wright, “see local officials giving allegiance to Caesar. They see bullying magistrates, threatening officers. They see prison and torture…But they are learning to look through the lens of scripture and see Jesus, the Word become flesh who lived among us.”   

The master teacher, Jesus, created a parable that challenged a scholar of the law to see his community’s age-old enemy, a Samaritan, modelling love of neighbor and living out God’s true command. It must have sounded crazy - like touching the moon with a stick!

Gratefully,

Father Dan ofm