Back to Nazareth

“He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up.” (Lk 4:16)

In Luke’s Gospel, the first named place where Jesus goes to preach is the town where he grew up, Nazareth.  He goes back to his human roots in order to sow there the seed of the good news.  He knows he is more than this human origin, but he loves the place, he loves the people who helped him grow into adulthood, so he chooses to share his full self with them, newly baptized, claimed by the Father as beloved Son, tested in the desert by Satan, coming in the power of the Spirit.

At certain moments of our lives, we too remember our origins, revisit our hometown.  We may have opportunity to visit the place we grew up, or if this is not possible, we may do so in our imagination.  During our recent retreat, Fr Isaac told a part of his own story as a way of “stirring the pot,” of evoking reflection on our own stories.  For me, this stirring of the pot evoked a swirl of childhood memories.  I have spent time walking though the rooms of every house I have lived in, the classrooms of my primary school, the halls of my secondary school, the village lanes and coastal paths and mountain landscapes.  The sights and smells come back to me in waves, the people, the color of their hair and the style of their garments, the sound of voices, words spoken, deeds done, and feelings, sensations, spiritual intuitions.

What for?  Why go back?  Are we just navel-gazing, allowing ourselves to be distracted by the mysteries of the past?  Would we rather wallow in the delights and pains of childhood than face the music of now?  Certainly, we cannot always be living in the past, but at times we are invited there, whether in the body or in the memory.  We go back to reconnect with our roots, to understand better what we have lived and who we have become, to find God there, or perhaps, to bring him there.  It is not navel-gazing, but a way of integrating our past so as to live the present more fully

 “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?” (Lk 4:24)

Like Jesus, most of us go back as adults, taking to the place of our origins the person we have become.  Those we meet there may well say to us: We knew you when you were this big, when you were had no front teeth, when you made a puddle in class because you were too scared to ask to go to the bathroom, when you cut a classmate’s hair with scissors and hid from her mother at the next parent-teacher day, when you did an impression of Winnie the Pooh’s friend Piglet in English class and nobody laughed, when you dressed up as a two-headed monster, sharing a trash bag with your best friend.  They have seen us in our least flattering moments, and now here we are, all grown up, animated by a spirit unfamiliar to them.

I remember once during a family visit, one of the sisters asked my dad: So, do you see a change in your daughter?  His response: she’s just the same as when she was this big (gesturing toward his knee).  I must say that filled me with gladness.  He meant that I was myself in the monastery, and not some alien being unrecognizable to my family.  We are what our past has fashioned us to be, and we can never really disown it, even if we should wish to leave it all behind.  The sister, however, was asking about personal growth or conversion.  I certainly hope that some things have changed in me since I was knee-high to a grasshopper!  This is something we can sense more clearly when we revisit our past.

Not unlike Jesus, we needed to leave the place of our birth in order to grow beyond it, to become our full selves.  The changed person we have become may feel acutely out of place, no longer belonging, no longer at home.  We may not be accepted by those we left behind, or we may not want to accept those who stayed home.  Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Return of the Native, explores with great drama the bittersweet experience of leaving the familiar in search of something better, only to find that we can never quite go home.  Home is not there anymore.  Home becomes an elusive category, something we must seek in the present and ultimately in the future rather than in the past.  As the letter to the Hebrews puts it: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come” (Hb 13:14).

“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Lk 4:21)

Jesus reads aloud a passage from the Prophet Isaiah.  In so doing, he claims his own identity in a word of God spoken to Israel centuries before.  We will see this again at the very end of the Gospel, when during the journey to Emmaus, the risen Christ opens the Scriptures to his confused and saddened disciples: “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:25-7).  These two bookends of the Gospel of Luke give us permission to read the Old Testament as the story of Christ.  What’s more, I think they also give us permission to look there for our own story.

As the disciples’ hearts burned on the road to Emmaus, so our hearts burn at times with the realization that Christ is telling us our own story through the Scriptures.  By virtue of our Baptism, Christ’s story becomes ours, so he invites us into the Scriptures as into our own home.  Sometimes a bible story or a verse touches us deeply, but without revealing its full significance to our understanding.  It may take years to grasp the message from God that touches our life at its core.  Cassian speaks in his fourteenth Conference of the knowledge of Scriptures that grows in us through learning and study, but primarily through a breadth of heart engendered by toilsome experience.  “As our mind is increasingly renewed by this study, the face of Scripture will also begin to be renewed, and the beauty of a more sacred understanding will somehow grow with the person who is making progress” (Conf 14.11.1).  This is not something we can force.  Even the great Origen, father of Scriptural exegesis and master of the spiritual sense, was sometimes accused of falling into eisegesis, that is reading into the Scriptures what was not there.  After a while, we begin to recognize when we are manipulating the word to fit what we want it to say or trying to apply arbitrary intellectual categories to it.  We see this even in the writings of our Cistercian fathers and mothers.  Sometimes a biblical analogy just seems like a lot of words about nothing.  At other times it touches the spiritual heart of what we are experiencing, and we know it to be true in the deepest sense.  I suppose like much in the spiritual life, learning to do lectio is a matter of trial and error.  But one of the most helpful things I have heard is that to look at our own life – past, present and future – with the eyes of faith is to see it as salvation history.  It is the story of God drawing us to himself through many tribulations.  In this sense it is so very fitting that the Salvation History recounted in the Scriptures reveals itself as our own story.

It is sometimes said that our final judgement will consist in a blow-by-blow reliving of every moment of our lives to account for it before God.    Such a thing may fill us with trepidation, but if we have already begun to look back and to see things more clearly, the good, the bad we have done or that has been done to us, it will not be so much of a surprise.  And if we have begun to see our own life in all its vicissitudes no longer with sadness or anger or regret at all that was not as it should have been, but with compassion and gratitude, then we will already have a sense of the merciful gaze of God.  He looks into every detail of our lives and understand them long before we do.  He knows, and one day we too will know our full story, our salvation history.

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