The last two masses Daniel and I have gone to have had the wrong readings. I wondered if maybe we should leave that mass to go to a later one; if then we would be getting the correct reading, but I thought that God must have wanted all of us in this room to experience the wrong reading.
We stayed and listened. This past Sunday, we got the gospel reading about Lazarus being raised from the dead. The priest was excited about it because it’s one of his favorites. He began passionately talking about how Jesus let this dead man out of the tomb after four days and told another to unwrap his cloths.
Father explained that this unwrapping was Jesus’ way of saying he brought this man back from the dead permanently, and the unwrapping of the cloths was a sign of a new beginning, of letting go of your past, to walk out of your own tomb because you have been raised from the dead through Christ.
There was a lot more he said, and he said it so well, but I couldn’t give it justice if I tried to repeat it here. I did take away that I need to drop the past completely, and live in the present and reach for the future. Which is something I needed to have thrown my way.
I have such a problem with letting the past control me. Letting go of the past is one of those things that’s a lot easier said than done. Memories can be good or bad, but the world has moved on and changed. Those memories aren’t today. You can either learn from it and forget it, or can get stuck in the nostalgia of it all. One is staying in the tomb, the other is walking out.
Mom Life and Beyond 