Peace be with you!

And Happy (belated) Easter! I confess to getting wrapped up in travel (which involved a lot of waiting at the airport) and singing with the choir for Good Friday and Easter Vigil and visiting family…. I hope your Easter was a blessed culmination of your Lenten journey.

Let’s spend ten minutes with Fr. Freeh and parishioners Vicki Phillips and Pat Henry in their discussion of the Holy Spirit in constituting the Church and our individual transformation.

So now…I’m thinking puzzles.

My family does at least one puzzle every Christmas, and fairly often during the reunions. We huddle around the table, passing around the box lid, older generations introducing the young’uns into the mysterious delight of fitting pieces together to create a complete picture. We blame our late Great Aunt Gertie (who is also held responsible for the family’s Scrabble addiction).

There are some who believe that humanity’s changing understanding of God from pagan times through Old Testament to New Testament somehow proves that we have simply made Him up. If God were real, wouldn’t He just come and tell us, and we wouldn’t need to go through all that?

I don’t get that at all. In real life, on the merely human level, we accept that people are puzzles.

We recognize others can help us to understand what we ourselves don’t see about someone else. And we know that we can spend a lifetime getting to know another person and still discover unsuspected depths. When it comes to knowing someone…we’ll never find the last piece to complete the picture.

Scaling this process up from human to Divine, it’s absurd to think that human understanding of God wouldn’t change over time. If it takes more than one lifetime to understand a single person…how many lifetimes does it take to understand the ominpotent God?

Clearly, one human mind simply isn’t capable of comprehending God. Even the best of us–a Francis of Assisi or Therese of Lisieux–can bring only a piece of the puzzle.

And while some pieces are very pretty by themselves, they are easily scattered, making no lasting contribution to the greater puzzle–unless they have a frame to contain them, and the picture on the box lid to give them context and meaning.

When it comes to human understanding of God…the Holy Spirit operates on every level: piece, frame, and box lid.

He calls each individual to know Him. He operates within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church to provide the framework to gather together the wisdom of every age and culture, even from pagan times, but especially through Scriptures both Old and New, and Sacred Tradition. Catholics call this collective understanding of God the “Deposit of Faith.” And the Holy Spirit orders the whole according to the foundational truth:

“God is Love.”

Catholic parents everywhere–like Vicki and Pat–rely on their extended family, on the Church, to teach their children about God. And this truth reveals on a small scale the dynamic of revelation history across the ages:

God yearns for every single human heart. But He knows He far exceeds the capacity of any one soul to truly know Him. And so He establishes a chosen people, a Church, to sustain every single heart on its journey to Him. As a member of community of faithful, gathering, preserving, and sharing our collective wisdom under the guidance of the Holy Spirit…we know Him better, and therefore love Him more.

God is Love. A truth revealed to little ones, hidden from the wise. Which might be why we find Him so puzzling. But throughout the ages, from generation to generation, we share the mysterious delight of discovering Him.

Readings for Divine Mercy Sunday.