By: Bro. Rey Julo Biliran, C.Ss.R. | Province of Cebu
A Faith Sharing on Luke 24:35-48 (Thursday of the Octave of Easter)
Some life experiences leave us marks that can never be erased in our memory. Experiences that shaped us both, good and bad, caused us trauma or shaped us for the better. Psychology calls it, core memory. Let me lead you to a short exercise. In a minute, I want you to remember a core memory, whether from childhood or the recent past… As a child, I remember being accidentally left in a mall. In five minutes, my mother got lost in my sight. The helpless six-year-old boy was left in tears, calling his mom. Yes, five minutes. It was short but left a wound to that child.
In 2016, two of my batchmates and I were recommended to work to address some personal issues. Grieving for the demise of my grandmother, insecure of the professional world I knew so little, enduring with utmost patience the difficulty of looking for a job, plus a heart disappointed of how things had turned out, I trusted the process and persevered.
Core memory. Core memories are encounters or life experiences that mattered and made a difference. When we look back, we have these encounters. In today's Gospel, which is the continuation of the one yesterday, we hear of the two disciples, Cleopas and an unnamed one. Coming from Emmaus, where they experienced one of their core memories as Jesus' disciples, they recounted what they have witnessed and remembered. They encountered the Lord along the way. It was the Lord. It was Jesus who indeed resurrected, as Simon said. That encounter, a core memory, changed their troubled hearts, crushed hope, shattered dreams and unmet expectations to a faith ready to profess to the world even amid persecution.
This is the power of our core memories. We can move forward and integrate life anew when we become aware of them, revisit them, and accept their joys, pains, lessons, and regrets. The choice is ours, my dear friends. It is up to us if we allow ourselves to wallow in our wounds and trauma or if we choose to pick up our broken pieces and integrate them anew. But this will never be easy if we rely solely on our efforts. This is the reminder that the encounter with Jesus in Emmaus brought the disciples to. The disciples' encounter with the Lord brought them transformation. It got them new hope. It got them a new life. It gave them the vigor to stand once more. Only with God's grace can we bring genuine transformation to our traumatic pasts, our wounded persons – to that crying child left for a moment, to that lad who was overwhelmed.
Aren't they the same lessons the Lord wants to teach us? Aren't they the same memories of which we were not in control anymore that the Lord is inviting us to embrace and accept? Aren't they the same invitation the Lord wants us to respond to and move on?
My dear friends, we might be wondering, for even though we do our best to transcend or move forward with those memories and marks of the past, we still fall short of that perfection. The Lord's apparition gives us a symbolic consolation to this. In his resurrection, his victory over sin and death, Jesus, with his wounds, tells us that what had made us will always be part of us. Perhaps this is why Jesus is always depicted with his wounds, even after his resurrection. Our wounds will always be part of us, yet we are called to heal. It's up to us whether we remain dead in the dark corners of our tombs or be resurrected by the grace of becoming whole, like the disciples from Emmaus. Again, the choice is up to us.
As we continue with this Eucharist, we beg for the grace that we may always choose for wholeness, making our encounters with the Lord an impetus for change from being wounded and shattered to becoming whole and ready to run back to our "Jerusalems," prepared to share and be shared.
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