by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
Places where we live accumulate memories — sweet breezes we are sure no one else ever felt, blue spruces growing taller in every season, backsteps where grandpa liked to talk. To our physical memories of home we attach our experience of family belonging.
“The entire material universe speaks of God’s love,” Pope Francis writes in Laudato Si’. “The history of our friendship with God is always linked to particular places which take on intensely personal meaning…For anyone who has grown up in the hills or used to sit by a spring to drink, or played outdoors in a neighbourhood square, going back to these places is a chance to recover something of their true selves”(#84).
Jerusalem is home to God and home to God’s people in Israel’s history. David moves the Ark to this town. On its highest hill his son Solomon erects a temple for God to dwell among the people. Life in the shelter of its courts becomes a symbol of peace. Worship at its altars becomes an experience of belonging to God’s people.
When the Babylonians defeat Israel in 587 B.C., they breach the city walls, burn and level its homes, tear down the temple, and carry the able-bodied into exile in Babylon.
Our Jewish ancestors in faith might have vanished as a people except for the scrapbookers of the exile — the priests who collected and wrote down their history. After nearly 50 years in exile the people might have lost their religious identity without the prophet Second Isaiah who preached a new exodus, a way home through the wilderness.
Enough of the children and grandchildren of the exiles returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the city, its walls, and temple. To new generations they passed on the history of God’s creative, faithful, liberating love that the priests had collected and written down, scripture we read to this day.
- What memories of home and parish do you hold? How is God part of them?