A Reflection for Saturday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
When Jesus realized this, he withdrew from that place.
Many people followed him, and he cured them all,
but he warned them not to make him known (Mt 12:14-16).
When I was in elementary school, I had this problem where my knuckles would dry out and crack throughout the cold Ohio winter to the point where they would frequently bleed. To try and stop this, I developed something of a tic where I would pack lotion and rub it on my hands during the school day. One day, the lotion exploded inside my pencil box, covering all of my school supplies, which led to me embarrassingly asking my teacher if I could take some time to clean everything.
Another kid in the class, Jamey, who had plenty of friends, saw me, who did not have plenty of friends, during this awkward and weird exchange and decided he would befriend me. Jamey would do this throughout his life: He had a nose for the kid sitting alone at a lunch table or who hadn’t quite developed their social skills or who had a rough personality that drove most others away. He drew close to you with a genuine curiosity, trying to figure out what made you tick. And when he figured it out (or even if he never did), he invited you along for the ride. It was real. He would make fun of you the way friends do, in a way that made you feel like you were in on the joke (because that lotion in the pencil box exploding thing was quite funny and weird, after all).
Jamey died this week. I had started writing this reflection before I found out. I started writing about why Jesus “withdrew from that place”—from the Pharisees—about discerning when it’s right to carry out a ministry by laying low and when it’s right to rise up against injustice. But sometimes the only thing we can bring to the Gospel and prayer (and writing) is the thing eating away at us. And when I read the words that Jesus had “many people” follow him and he “cured them all,” all I can think about was Jamey and his smile and dimples that would cure an entire town.
Jamey understood at a fundamental level that life is supposed to be fun. He never cared much (or at least indicated that he did) about how other people thought of him, even in the long, distressing middle school years. He walked around comfortably in who he was. He was effortlessly and naturally cool and charismatic and could walk into any clique and make a friend.
On a personal level, I owe him for so many things, big and small. He invited me to our high school youth group, where I got my faith and met my wife. He took me with his family on vacation to New York City for the first time when we were kids. He was my partner in the county fair three-legged race (we were something of a dynasty in the early 2000s). And he gave me a childhood filled with adventures and sleepovers and inside jokes.
I hope to honor his memory by looking out for that lonely soul looking for a friend, remembering to never take myself seriously and to treat life like the gift from God that it is. I invite you to do the same.
Jamey was a father, a husband, a son, a friend to a million people, and I was lucky to be one of them. The world is dimmer without him, and I will miss him.
