A Reflection for Thursday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge. (Ps 90)
In the weeks leading up to a recent trip to Ireland, I decided to do some ancestry research. I’ve always known that my relatives came over on boats from the old country; my family is filled with proud Irish Americans. (The name and the red hair and the near-constant need for SPF 50+ sort of give it away, I suppose.)
But in digging deeper into my family’s story, I was struck by the spirituality of the specific. While I set out mostly to figure out where they lived so I could drive through the town in a rental car, I was blown away to find names, dates and even a few grainy photos. A hazy mental picture began to form; I found my imagination filling in the forgotten details of their lives, wondering what kinds of little moments might have characterized their everyday.
If you use a resource like Ancestry.com, your sources of information include immigration records and birth certificates, yearbook photos and newspaper clippings. If you come from a family like mine, and if that family comes from a place like Ireland, some of your most valuable sources of information are church records. I found my family members’ names, often handwritten, on records of parish memberships and on documentations of baptisms, weddings and funerals. These records, including locations and dates, helped me picture their lives more than almost anything else. In a different time and place, they received some of the same sacraments that I have, and they too celebrated and mourned and prayed with their church community.
When I finally arrived on Irish soil, the fingerprints of faith were all around me. History, that of my family and of the nation more broadly, began to click into place in my brain as I saw the places where it happened—and the remnants it left behind. For me, it felt like walking on holy ground, and my ancestors, though they weren’t physically there walking alongside me, seemed alive to me in prayer.
In the hungry, tense, sometimes violent history of the Irish republic, a tradition of faith and personal relationships with God have played a vital role. It’s like the Psalmist says today: In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge. The words ring true when we think of the people in our families, whether we knew them in this life or not, who have passed on the tradition of faith to us. In the face of trials and joys we won’t ever know, they talked to God and found solace in prayer. Because of them, we’re here today. Because of them, God is our refuge, too—in the many ages of our past and future.
