Four-year-old Alice is brushing her teeth before bed. Mom and Dad went out for the night, and big sister is at a friend’s house.
So, my husband and I came for pizza, books and play with Alice. She’s an easy kid to be with. As she spits her toothpaste into the sink, she looks up at me.
“When are you and Grandpa leaving?” she asks. “We’ll go home when your mom and dad come home,” I reply, wondering what’s behind that question. I hasten to add, “We would never leave you here alone.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know,” she says matter-of-factly. I think of her, lying awake in her dark room, wondering if Grandpa and Gram are heading out to the car. I add emphatically, “Alice, we would never leave you here alone.”
Despite my faith, or lack of it, sometimes that fear of being left alone comes over me at the end of the Easter season. I know that God is with me. Jesus sent his Holy Spirit to us on Pentecost, energizing his faithful. Jesus promised to be with us to the end of time.
But there’s something in me, on the day we celebrate his Ascension, that always cries out, “Don’t leave yet.” Those Gospel stories of encounters with the risen Christ are so wonderful. I want Jesus to cook fish for me on the shore at the Sea of Galilee. I want to hear Christ call my name in the garden.
I’m a bit like the little boy in the old story who is afraid during a bad storm. He runs to his mom’s bedroom in the night in fear of the wind and pelting rain. Mom assures him that God is with him in the dark. He’s safe in his own room.
I know God is here, he says, “but I want someone with skin on.”
Maybe that’s all of us sometimes. We want the Jesus who cured the sick, healed the lame, even brought Lazarus back from the dead. Like Thomas, we want to put our fingers in those wounds. We want that Jesus with skin on.
When I feel that yearning, I remind myself that that same Jesus is with me when I pray. I’ve been studying the Psalms, and the text I’m using is “Psalms for All Seasons” by John Craghan.
There are 150 Psalms, the same 150 that Jesus himself knew from Hebrew Scripture. They were a deep part of his prayer life. As he suffered on the cross, both Matthew and Mark have him exclaiming, from Psalm 22, the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus going away to a quiet place to pray reminds me that I, too, am not alone when I pray.
“At prayer,” writes Craghan, “we are invited to listen to the inaudible but real God.” Inaudible, intangible, but nevertheless real.
But you still want “skin on”? Yeah, me, too, and that’s why Jesus left us a communal faith. If I barely know the people sitting around me at Sunday Mass, I’m missing a big part of the story. Community is at the heart of being a Catholic.
There are faith-sharing groups out there that beckon us. There are food banks and Catholic charities serving the unhoused and the migrant that need our help. In those people who serve, and in those marginalized who need our help, we encounter Jesus — the Jesus with skin on.
The more we act out of love with others and for others, the more we learn that Jesus doesn’t leave us alone in the night.
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