Fritz von Uhde, “The Way to Emmaus,” 1891 Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter
Readings: Acts 2:14, 22-33  1 Peter 1:17-21  Luke 24:13-35

Attended by his wife and daughter, a man lies dying in Houston. His parents could never have envisioned the life of wealth and power their son would accrue as an oil executive, one who championed the denial of climate change. As he sees it, he has bought the country 30 more good years, saving it from “libdopes,” liberals who would have curtailed the American promise of individual freedom.   

He is also attended by those who never knew him in life. They meet him only in their own death. They are spirits caught between this world and the next, which they refer to as “elevation.” 

Jill Blaine, a young woman from Indiana, killed in a 1970s car explosion, one intended for someone else, monitors and tries to influence the final reflections of K.J. Boone. For that is the meaning of life in Vigil (2026), the newest novel by George Saunders: pondering the past, picking through it, piece by piece, trying to see for the first time what you could not see before. 

There was a world to run, and you ran it, K.J.

Bravo, congrats, many thanks.

Now grab you some Heavenly grub. Name your poison. A heightened version of the best meal you ever had? Sure, here you go: Paris, 1986, scallops but looking pretty as a dessert, gold leaf sprinkled over the top. An exact re-creation of that special birthday meal Mother whipped up when you turned ten? Steak, fried potatoes, angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries and afterward Mother let you have a sip of her wine out on the porch swing? Eat up, please enjoy. That had been back in the days when he’d sometimes go wading after school in Crow Creek. Having missed the bus, he’d walk home in wet trousers, only to catch all kind of heck from Mother upon arriving, including the belt. Which, in those days, was common. And nobody minded about the so-called violence of that.

Much.

Once a salamander from the creek hopped out of his pantcuff and sent Mother dashing into the bedroom wailing at the top of her lungs.

George Saunders is America’s greatest living novelist, if one can rank great art, which is always sui generis. Only Marilynne Robinson writes with the same depth of spiritual vision. 

Saunders has explored the afterlife before in his 2017 Lincoln in the Bardo, for which he won the Booker Prize.

God does not appear in Vigil. “Elevation” is not explained. But those who have already passed try to compel a dying man to reexamine his life, to ponder its limited, apparently senseless scenes, asking what they mean and above all deciding who he has become in their wake. Saunders thus presents a compelling vision of purgatory. It is very much a piece of this life, a pondering after death, one whose purpose is to collect and channel the meaning, the direction, of life. 

St. Augustine suggested that this is also what happened on the road to Emmaus. Two disciples were pondering. And that is precisely how Christ eventually came to them, in the pondering. “Their eyes were held from recognizing him; their hearts, you see, needed more thorough instruction. Recognition is deferred” (Sermon 232.3).

Reflecting on the Emmaus story, St. Augustine suggested that the risen Lord enters our lives when we ponder, even though we cannot see the one who gathers us in by way of our memories. 

Those two, even when the Lord was talking to them, did not have faith, because they didn’t believe he had risen. Nor did they have any hope that he could rise again. They had lost faith, lost hope. They were walking along dead, with Christ alive. They were walking along, dead, with life itself. Life was walking alone with them, but in their hearts life had not yet been restored (Sermon 235.3).

And the bishop of Hippo should know. For what is the classic that he left to civilization other than a long pondering in prayer, a search within his own story for the one whom Augustine continually addresses in his Confessions as “You”? 

When prayer passes beyond the recitation of words, it becomes a pondering. We think that we are being distracted in prayer by the resurgence of so many apparently meaningless memories, assaulted by still restless desires we wish would depart us. But prayer is precisely a pondering, one done in the mysterious, apparently aloof, presence of the Lord.

In Saunders’s novel, the unsettled dead find themselves by helping the recalcitrant dying to see their lives for what they are. Augustine sees the Eucharist as something quite similar.  

We speak of it in the Greek as an anamnesis, which we typically translate as “remembering,” something we accomplish first in hearing the word and then in pronouncing the church’s great act of thanksgiving. But “pondering” might be the better word because it suggests active purpose, done in the presence of a hidden Lord who leads the process. 

This is the meaning of all prayer, which is properly collective before it becomes personal. Who is the Lord who reveals himself in our story? Personal prayer extends the Eucharist. It is also a pondering because you cannot find yourself, you cannot comprehend your life, without reflecting upon what has already happened to all of us, all the saints and sinners who went before. 

Ah yes, brothers and sisters, but where did the Lord wish to be recognized? In the breaking of the bread. We’re all right, nothing to worry about—we break bread, and we recognize the Lord. It was for our sake that he didn’t want to be recognized anywhere but there, because we weren’t going to see him in the flesh, and yet we were going to eat his flesh. So if you’re a believer, any of you, if you’re not called a Christian for nothing, if you don’t come to church pointlessly, if you listen to the Word of God in fear and hope, you take comfort in the breaking of the bread. The Lord’s absence is not an absence. Have faith, and the one you cannot see is with you (Sermon 235.3). 

We are all on the road to Emmaus, fleeing our past, running from our fears. Who knows where we will end up if we do not find ourselves, if we fail to comprehend who we have become? But in the end, we do not really find ourselves. As we ponder, we are given to ourselves by the one who gave himself to us. 

What Augustine said of those two discouraged disciples is equally true of us. “The Master was walking with them along the way, and himself was the way. But they were not yet walking along the way” (Sermon 235.2).

And what is the way? The pondering we call prayer.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.