Graduation is upon us. And soon so will be all the class reunions this summer.
I don’t know if you have been to your ten year class reunion, if you haven’t you’re in for a surprise. You think everyone would have grown up. But you find out, once you get there, if feels like you are still in high school.
Once upon a time, there was a fiftieth reunion of a high school class. Everyone was in their late sixties, yet they had no trouble remembering one another. The reunion was a grace for all because everyone felt young again and felt a promise that perhaps they could be young again permanently.
Two men who had been inseparable through grammar school and high school and who had a fight on graduation day met each other for the first time in fifty years. They grinned, shook hands, and then, with the new emotional freedom that some men have learned from their wives, they hugged one another. They spent the rest of the day laughing together about the good times they had enjoyed when they were young, so much fun, so much laughter, so many good times, so much happiness.
They talked about all the years since then, the excitement and terror of the war, the surprise of prosperity after the war, happiness despite strain in their marriages, problems and triumphs with their children and grandchildren.
Somehow it seemed that they eliminated the separation of a half century, that they had been close all those fifty years since their graduation. Old grudges are forgotten, differences are ignored. Turns out you’ve been friends all along without even knowing it.
As someone said, we couldn’t get away from our friendship no matter how hard we tried. Such is the nature of the friendship Jesus promised us at his Last Supper when he broke the bread and shared it, took the cup of wine, blessed and shared it with all the world.
Adapted from a homily by Fr. Andrew M. Greeley. Thanks to Unsplash for the photo.
Do you think there will come a day when all of the political divisions that divide you from family members and friends will be forgotten like the divisions you had in high school? What will it take? Only the passage of time? Fifty-year reunions?
Think of an old classmate of yours that YOU have reconnected with. What made the reunion special?
IF GOD IS MAKING YOU WAIT, THEN BE PREPARED TO RECEIVE MORE THAN WHAT YOU ASKED FOR.
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