A Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 66:18-21 Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13 Luke 13:22-30
This was before 24-hour news, before television itself. What there was to see was limited to a British Pathé newsreel, which people would have watched in movie theaters before the main feature. This one from 1937 was entitled “A Tragedy of the Pacific.”
Only a short time ago Amelia Earhart checked over every detail of her $80,000 flying laboratory in preparation for her round the world flight. This was to have been her greatest achievement. A sky dash of 28,000 miles! With her husband, George Palmer Putnam on right, she discussed the hazardous course, which had been plotted for her by Fred Noonan, the navigator who embarked with Miss Earhart upon this great flight, a flight which was to have marked her retirement to aeronautical research. [Engines roar as search planes go aloft.] Then to a waiting world came news of disaster as the plane failed to reach tiny Holland Island in mid-Pacific. A British freighter, the coast guard, and the navy sped to the search. The Battleship Colorado steaming out from Honolulu under forced draft. [More roaring engines and more take offs.] From California the Aircraft Carrier Lexington with 3,000 men and 72 planes aboard, races into the distant Pacific to join the greatest searching party in the history of aviation.
In 1928, Amelia Earhart had been the first woman passenger to cross the Atlantic by airplane. There were not many women pilots in the 1930s, and Earhart was not among the best trained or most experienced of them. But sheer determination propelled her. Much of it—as detailed by Laurie Gwen Shapiro in her The Aviator and the Showman (2025)—came from her publisher and promoter husband George Putnam.
In 1932, Earhart became the first woman to make a solo trans-Atlantic flight. That involved loading a plane with all the fuel it could take and still lift off. Then the pilot would have to navigate, practically blind, toward the European continent. Earhart aimed for Paris. She hit Northern Ireland.
Successes and accolades mounted, leading to a 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe. On a first try in 1936, going west to east, Earhart’s plane took off from California. It crash-landed in Hawaii. A year later, urged on by her husband, a now reluctant pilot tried again, this time flying east out of California.
The worst challenge came at the close of the globe-circling attempt: crossing the vast Pacific Ocean. Holland Island is about half the size of Central Park, almost impossible to find without sophisticated navigation. Earhart and Noonan had only rudimentary skills in Morse Code. That limited them to short-range voice communication, and a damaged antenna on a new R.D.F. (radio direction finding) instrument, which would have allowed them to hone in on transmissions, had been jettisoned, along with a life raft, to limit the plane’s weight before the last take-off. Yet many pounds of postage stamps, which Putnam had packed aboard the plane to be canceled and later sold as souvenirs, were still included.
It is all too easy to judge any historical figure in hindsight. Consider instead some fundamentally wrong choice that you have made in your own life. How many times have you imagined what life would be like if you had never acted as you did? As you remember the decision, keep two facts in mind.
First, every choice is a turn. When you went one way, you closed off a multitude of other choices, other directions that you might have taken. That is the nature of any life decision. We choose the one and say “no” to the multitude.
Second, you were the one who acted. However uninformed you might have been, whatever pressures might have weighed heavily, you made the decision. You went one way, saying “no” to the horizon of other ways that stood in front of you.
This is an ineluctable but often ignored truth: To choose is also to close, forever to say “no” to what might have been.
We can change our ways, but we cannot recreate what is past. We can only move forward with new decisions. And notice that a refusal to choose is itself a choice. Life does not permit us to stand still.
Pondering life as a chain of choices can help us understand the coming judgment that Christ proclaims. If we picture some human figure, pronouncing a decision upon our lives from the clouds, it can all seem so arbitrary. It is difficult for us to picture a divine judge who is not bound by the past nor swayed by prejudice.
Better to think of God himself as a horizon, one we either approach or shun. There is only one small part of reality that God does not encompass: you! Your free will, your decision. God created us to choose. For as long as we live, we either open or close ourselves to the horizon that is God.
The decision for or against God, for or against the real, the ultimate reality, is made in myriad smaller life choices. But make no mistake: Because we are creatures, because we are those who do not possess our own origin or destiny, we are those who cannot help but choose. We cannot remain within ourselves.
However many chapters and scenes your life may include, in each of them you have a single, fundamental decision to make, one that either solidifies your story or consigns it to oblivion, so thoroughly forgotten as never to have existed.
Most of us have made bad choices, decisions that closed off so much. But our lives are not over! They have not ceased to be open to something more. New prospects still beckon. The horizons of life are like squares on a board of chess. Every move alters their significance, their value, yet they remain before us as options. Until the game ends.
If we cling to the Lord, if we exercise faith, hope and charity—we call them “theological virtues,” or strengths, because in them we literally choose for or against God—even a wrong turn can become a narrow path, a way by which we find our way to God.
Is it not true, as the Letter to the Hebrews says,
At the time,
all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain,
yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness
to those who are trained by it (12:11)?
The Gospel insists that we are never lost at sea. Even the saddest choices can still become our saving strengths. With grace, they can become the narrow way.
So many decisions have been made, so many possible horizons closed, yet here we are, deciding what to make of ourselves, whom to trust, which way to go.
And still Christ says to us,
Strive to enter through the narrow door,
for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter
but will not be strong enough (Lk 13:24).
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