Awaiting the “Peace of the Holy Spirit” — Fifteenth Week of “Ordinary Time,” July 15 to 21, 2012

It is well and good — but a little abstract — to say that as the “risen Jesus,” we should be living the life of Father, Son and Spirit” — a life of relationship with other persons, human and divine.

We have no problem saying it. But how do we make it real? If "relationship" is the reality of our life, what should it look like?

A “rising star” young author, Tanner Colby, has brought that question down to earth in a way we may love or hate. His brilliant, poignant, equally heart-rending and side-splitting book, Some of My Best Friends Are Black (Viking, 2912), looks at racial integration as it is on paper and as it really is in schools, neighborhoods, the workplace, and in churches. To examine our relationships on ground level, his book is a challenging place to start. And it is mostly stories. He says it is “not a book about politics or policy... Most of the book is just stories about people.”

Like the Gospels. And like our lives. When we meet Jesus after death, he is only going to be interested in the stories that tell how we dealt with people — and his Father, of course. And, as we saw last week, it won’t be about what we did for people, or did for God, but about the relationship we sought or neglected to seek with both.

“Peace” was the key word on Jesus’ lips after his resurrection. And it should be a key word to describe our relationship with each other as his risen body. But the “peace of the Holy Spirit” is more than the absence of conflict. In fact, the very absence of visible conflict in “façade integration” can be precisely the “invisibility cloak” that keeps us from seeing that no peace is there. Love on the lips can hide hate in the heart — as Jesus preached so forcefully to the Pharisees.

But the Spirit prevails — given time. Tanner Colby found racial integration mostly a failure in terms of its essential reality: relationships. He searched in schools, neighborhoods, workplaces and churches. But finally, in a little church in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, his native state, he said, “I found what I went looking for.”

“I saw black people at white churches, and I saw white people at black churches, but what I never saw anywhere but here was a black and white Church.” He calls it “The Miracle of Grand Coteau” — a miracle it took thirteen pastors and forty years of prayer and suffering to bring about. And the key players were laity. As one parishioner put it, “You have to go through Good Friday to get to Easter, and we went through an awful lot of Good Fridays.”

Fr. Charlie Thibodeaux, the priest who began it all, saw the kingdom come. “It was agonizing. But to see it now, the tension gone, the people more at ease, I thank God they’re finally united as brothers and sisters. Humanly speaking, it seemed like it was impossible. But with God there is always hope. It just takes time.”

When we say, “Peace be with you” at Mass, we are looking forward, awaiting “the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.” When he comes, our relationship with each other will be that of Father, Son and Spirit.

This is the triumph of Jesus: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

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