Daily Reflection Thursday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time

One of my favorite hymns for the past several years now has been "God Beyond All Names" by the Irish composer Bernadette Farrell. In lyrical language and haunting melody, she valiantly puts words to our deepest longings and experiences of intimacy with a God who is, at the end of the day, indeed beyond our power to name and to claim. (The verse "God of tender care, you have cradled us in goodness; you have mothered us in wholeness; you have loved us into birth" gives me the 'hot eyes' every time.)

We have been reading this week from the Book of Wisdom -- compilations from a sage writing as a member of the outpost Jewish community in Alexandria about a hundred years before the coming of Christ. In today's excerpt, speaking in the person of Solomon and placing his teachings on the lips of the wise King of Hebrew tradition, our writer tries a descriptive list of his own. What is this Spirit of Wisdom, the aura of the mighty power of God? he asks -- and then goes on to use twenty-three (!) other adjectives, a vocabulary roster worthy of an SAT-Prep course ('effusion,' 'refulgence,' beneficent,' perduring'), metaphors and analogies ('spotless mirror,' surpassing every constellation of the stars'). Despite his noble attempts, we are still left with a feeling of inadequacy. There are no words. God beyond all names, adjectives, metaphors.

The Pharisees in our Gospel passage are asking for a list, too. When will the Kingdom of God come? What is the checklist we should be developing? Did they understand the response from Jesus? The Kingdom will be revealed not in future external events but in the hidden recesses of a heart filled with lovingkindness, justice, mercy, forgiveness, a willingness to suffer for the good of others. These virtues are the checklist of a life of discipleship, a kingdom already among us, known with the eyes of faith to see and an openness to the Wisdom/Spirit of God to pursue.

It was on this day in 1989 that six Jesuit priests were assassinated in the capitol city San Salvador during the fratricidal war in El Salvador -- martyred because of their fierce commitment to the virtues of compassion, justice, and solidarity. A housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her sixteen-year-old daughter Celina were murdered as well, representative of the more than seventy thousand victims, mostly poor and anonymous, who had already died in a decade of war that had begun with the assassination of Saint Archbishop Oscar Romero. Their lives and witness need no descriptor, no embellishments. They are "holy souls from age to age -- friends of God, and prophets." No other label is necessary.