Remembering Through Change

Most people have anniversaries, but priests and religious have jubilees. They are the same kind of event. Anniversaries and jubilees mark time in the life of the community and of the individuals. Anniversaries are more on the side of counting years and days from the past to the present. Jubilees, with roots in the Jewish scriptures, are more filled with values and faith. Anniversaries can involve remembrance of the action of God in human histories, but not necessarily. Jubilees, in contrast, focus on God as the initiator of the process and his continual presence in the experience.

Jubilees in the Jewish scriptures reminded God’s People that their lives were dependent on God, and the gifts and talents of creation were kind of on loan to a Pilgrim People. A major occurrence of Jubilee happened normally every fifty years. Fifty, whether for Jubilee or for Pentecost, was a number of fullness. God’s actions had filled and overflowed during the fifty years of people’s experience of God. A kind of “weekly jubilee” happened with the observance of the Sabbath.

Sabbath Rest
Sabbath rest was a day of rest and thankfulness for God’s creation, which was loaned to the people as a blessing. Like God himself at creation, the People rested from work to appreciate and give thanks. In their praise they could join the Creator in saying that everything was “good…, indeed, very good.” Having given thanks, the People of God were recharged and enlivened to take up living after the Sabbath.

The Jubilee Year, like the weekly Sabbath, was a time of rest and thankfulness. In the Jewish scriptures, for example, even the fields were to celebrate a time of Jubilee every fifty years. The fields were to rest that they might be enlivened to produce more abundantly after the Sabbath year. It was also a time of social redistribution of communal fields and property, so that seemingly private fields were made available to the whole community, especially the poor. The community learned that creation, its crops, and its work were the property of all the People.

Thankfulness
Sabbaths and Jubilees, like anniversaries, marked the movement of human history through time and space. Most significantly, the community remembered God’s movement throughout their lives. Such remembrance brought thankfulness and confidence in the continued action of God. God was seen and known as faithful to his promised covenant.

Two of the friars at Christ the Redeemer mark Jubilees this year. Father Bill marks the blessings of people, things, and talents in his fifty years as a priest. Father Howard, in a similar way, remembers the fifty years of his vocation as a

friar and a priest since his entrance into the seminary. In each case, we take jubilee rest to remember God’s call to each of us and his action with many people in multiple and diverse places. Jubilee is more than personal, but is communal.

Ordination and entrance into the seminary invite remembrance and thankfulness not only for the priest or friar, or even the friars’ community, but for the whole Church. These occasions allow us to see and remember that God has done good things among us. We have been blessed and we continue to know the action of God.

In Good Times and in Bad
Like marriage anniversaries, jubilee allows us to know that God has blessed us in good times and in bad. He is a faithful God. His faithfulness invites fidelity from all of us. We walk forward with renewed confidence and trust that God will walk with us into tomorrow.

At the recent General Chapter of the Atonement Friars, fifty-eight friars convened to assess where the community is in the face of the future. What a great experience in a jubilee year! In examining the challenges of our times, the community was called to rest in the covenantal faithfulness of God. As those called and chosen, we could realistically look at the challenges of our time.

Our times appear diminished: fewer resources in property, finances, and vocations. The Friars are older and aging. To use a jubilee image, we have been long and hard at work in the field of mission and life. Jubilee provides some much needed rest, where mission and life rest on the action of God, not on us. At our meetings we could stop and rest from the journey, ever so briefly, and declare that our religious vocations had been “good, indeed very good.”

Jubilee is a graced moment not only for the celebrating friars, but a time filled with invitation and hope for tomorrow. God will again bring forth fruits from the fields of life. We can place our faith on that reality.

At the end of the General Chapter, the Minister General presented the Covenant Cross, which our Founder had received from the Foundress in 1898, to each of the Friars. By this Cross and by the one given to the other, they trusted the fidelity of God in the founding of the Friars and Sisters of the Atonement. Father Paul and Mother Lurana celebrated the fidelity of God. In receiving the Founder’s Cross, the Friars celebrated the good things of God and to the refounding of them in our future.

This Jubilee time is a blessed time for all of us. Having rested in thankfulness to the Father, let us search out the harvest of the Kingdom with renewed vigor for the task.

CDH