(Remember, the source for this is Matthew 5: 17 - 37; here continues the Homily for the Closing Mass at the Dominican Oxford House)
The day comes when that child must leave the security and comfort of her mother's womb so as to be born.
An ending paves the way for a new beginning.
That is the way God works.
Those radiant, splashed with vibrant colors leaves of October must fall to the ground and even decay and those barren tree limbs must bear the weight of the snow and the ice and withstand the frigid winds of winter; once that happens, spring can blossom.
Endings lead to beginnings; endings lead to inviting God to work anew.
In just days we will be entering another Season of Lent. This Lent, just like all that have gone before, will eventually bring us to a Friday -That Friday!
On that Friday we will focus on that hillside just outside of the walls of ancient Jerusalem.
And there the most tragic of endings took place.
On a cross!
And that dark evening and all through the following day the disciples of Jesus would be left in their own personal darkness.
They could not know then what God had in mind.
They could not imagine the shape of any coming Beginning.
They hurt.
They cried.
They felt that all was lost, ended, over.
But God's ways are not our ways.
God's ways are mysterious.
God's ways are better, always better for God is far wiser than any of us, even all of us, together.
And God does love us.
But that in-between time, between our endings and God's beginnings, we can feel pain and shed tears.
But that is when we most need to be a people of trust, of hope, of faith.
If that most tragic of endings had not taken place on that Friday, the wonder of that Sunday could not have been!
But from that ending God brought forth a Sunday like no other Sunday, like no other day in all of human history, a day that forever changed history.
Our God is a God of beginnings.
We just need to give God the chance!
Next - The Closing Homily: Oxford's Endings and Beginnings
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