Ears to hear it, eyes to see it

 Ears to hear it, eyes to see it

  We could.  Imagine it.  An etch-faced nun who'd traveled to Italy had taken us on a walkabout.  We'd stood in the sunshine and recounted putting fresh flowers on the Mary statue for May Day.  We'd shown her that we'd kept the Church's stained glass windows from being broken, and patched the chainlink fence hole where somebody'd cut through.  We'd rounded all the grades' playgrounds.  She was giving us a sense of "retreat".  By the time we left the sun outside and were crouching into a small room that would someday be a reading room, we really could imagine.

  For the early Christians there came a phase of silenced worship.  What had been experienced as get-together, maybe sharing food, maybe sharing fabrics and special mementos and candle wax/oil, was at a mixed pace of change.  In the face of arrests, beatings/torture, deaths related to persecution word was spreading, be careful.  Others were missing.  Most were confused as to what exactly was the wrong-doing.  Witnesses of the realism of persecution shuddered.

  The small whole of Christianity as yet undefined in religious terms and practices like Mass and Sacraments, was in a gradual-swift swing into, not resistance, not hiding, but

  we could imagine the intensity; imagine the conviction that something is really important; imagine the sorrows of sheltering love and good times; we could imagine how powerful then--to light a candle, to shake a hand, to find the remnant of somebody else's belief.

  For many of us that ability to understand, even without knowing all the details, was stoked in college.  Some of our most precious relationships were forged as we were leaving.  I mean, the whole time we are in college, we are also leaving.  There's that "space" that is similar for me to Catholic school basketball.  Your team practices and practices, prays together, gets all teamy-feely and then comes time to entreat with opponent.  Inevitably, the opponent is thug or enemy to the pal-spirit of your team.  On the court players are challenged to be best self and to strategize, execute, follow through for team.  As we got closer to graduations and other moving-ons from college, we'd glimpsed each other, we'd heard about each others' realities, we'd teamed in learning, and we were intensely near each other.

  There was a mix of emotions for everyone.