There is an e-mail story about a little boy who goes for a walk with root beer and Twinkies. He stops at a park and sits on a bench alongside an older man who is feeding pigeons. The boy starts to eat a Twinkie and offers the old man one. As he eats the Twinkie the old man gives the boy a smile like he has never seen before. His face just lights up. The boy gives him another Twinkie just so he will smile again.
They sit there all afternoon eating Twinkies and drinking root beer, never saying a word. When the day ends, the young boy starts to walk home. As he takes a few steps away, he turns, runs back to the man, and gives him a big hug. The man gives him the biggest smile that a person could give.
When the old man got home, he was radiant and told his son, "I spent today with God. He's much younger than I thought He'd be."
The little boy went home and told his mom, "I met God today, and He has the most beautiful smile you've ever seen."
How and where we meet Jesus in our daily lives is more of a mystery than it should be. In Leo Tolstoy's famous story "Martin the Cobbler", Martin is told that Jesus will come to see him. He waits and watches anxiously all day but does not see Jesus.
During the day he interrupts his watch several times to help a weary worker, an angry old woman with a misbehaving boy, and a freezing mother and her child. At night, when he complains that Jesus did not come, a voice tells him, "Martin, don't you know me?" Then the voices of all whom he helped in turn say, "It is I."
In a presentation The Mystery of the Incarnation, Father Ron Rolheiser says that Jesus went to heaven at the ascension, but Christ didn't. Christ is in the flesh on this planet. Christ is still with us in the Eucharist and in the community, the body of Christ. We are the body and blood of Christ on earth. This must give us pause!
St Augustine used to say, as he gave communion to an adult joining the faith for the first time, "receive what you are." Our job this Lent is to become a recognizable image of Christ.
That is certainly challenging, very exciting, and almost scary. We become Christ to the world. You and I might be the only Christ that someone sees in a whole lifetime.
The other aspect of seeing Christ in the world is to recognize Him in a lonely neighbour, a homeless victim, the hungry and the poor. When we find Christ in the poor, it will be much easier finding Him in the Word and in the Church.
God's presence also surrounds us in the wonders of creation. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush aflame with God.
But only those who see take off their shoes.
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.
