IF ONLY I CAN TOUCH

IF ONLY I CAN TOUCH

“Going fishing?”  I was in a queue at Lusaka airport facing the first of what seemed interminable security and passport checks and I saw a man with a long tube protruding for his rucksack.  “No,” he said, “I’ve been teaching chess in Zambian schools and this is my roll-up demonstration board.”  “Chess!?  And do they take to it?”  “Very much, they delight in solving the puzzles I set to start them off and then they really get into it.”  “And does it help them with their studies?”  “Absolutely! And not only in their maths, but even in their spelling.”  “Their spelling!” 

I was setting out on my triennial flight to Europe and realised I was once again moving from the normal predictability of my relationships into that other international world where people do not know me, nor I them.  It is exciting to encounter physically this beautiful world we inhabit.  A thousand of us snaked our way to the 40+ desks at passport control at Heathrow (London) and every nation under heaven was represented.  The EU signs of my last visit were already replaced with UK BORDER in huge letters just in case anyone has forgotten that the 37% of the population who voted in the referendum on Brexit had chosen to leave - by a margin of 52/48.  I have yet to meet anyone who agrees with the decision.

So, I have again this experience of the “joys and sorrows, the hopes and anxieties, of the people of this age.”  And yesterday I had lunch with five former Jesuits who entered about the same time as I did, 60 years ago.  The story of their lives, the joys and sorrows they met along the way, moved me very much.  Each one had had to struggle mightily.  Half of them I had not seen for fifty+ years and it was often hard to connect their worn features with the face they once had in the bliss of youth.

I was pondering these experiences as I read the two stories – one inside the other – in today’s gospel, about the death and rising of Jairos’ twelve year old daughter and the healing of the woman who was troubled with incessant bleeding for twelve years.  Both the man and the woman “touched” Jesus – the woman even touched his garment – in a way that broke through the cultural expectations of the time.  They found within themselves the courage, the faith, to reach out beyond convention and confess their inability to solve their problems on their own. 

We love solving problems, even chess problems.  (By the way, there is a Zambian chess grandmaster!).  But we often do not reach out to “touch his garment.”  As I endured my one hour crawl to the passport control desk I wondered how many of my thousand fellow travellers welcome Jesus as one who walks with them.  Perhaps, like the men going to Emmaus they don’t recognise him.     

1 July 2018                              Sunday 13 B

Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24       2 Corinthians 8:7…15             Mark 5:21-43