Mtr Mary Trainor

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?*

Dear friend,

I’ve always loved coffee. Hot and bold. Half and half (none of that non-dairy creamer for me.) Nowadays, a splash of sugar-free vanilla syrup.

As a child, I wasn’t allowed to actually drink coffee. I had to be satisfied just breathing in that wonderful aroma.

I pestered my parents about when I could coffee. Daddy’s answer to my chronic “when?” was always the same: “One of these first days.”

And how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?

One of these first days. What does it even mean? But a related insight surfaced as I was mulling over today’s Office Gospel. The insight was quite late in its appearance (some seventy years) and yet, oddly, right on time.

***

In John’s Gospel today Jesus has Pharisees chafing under the collar, so to speak. He and his detractors exchange serious challenges, yet Jesus is free to wander from there uninhibited, unharmed, unarrested.

Why? Because his hour had not yet come.

Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?

I’ve heard similar phrases in the church world: In the fullness of time. When the time is right. The end time.

It strikes me that the type of “time” referenced is not measured with a clock or a calendar. Maybe it is akin to how we talk about eternal life—already here but not yet in full bloom. It’s not linear like we experience in our daily existence.

His hour had not yet come is not to say that anyone actually knows the earthly time that “his hour” will be. More likely, I suspect, that hour will be defined in the moment, when determinant events coincide.

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.

My big insight this week was about time, if you haven’t guessed. So when Daddy said I would be able to drink coffee one of these first days, he wasn’t saying that merely to annoy me (which it did.) I truly believe he didn’t know when, but he trusted that the right time would make itself known. Which it did. I was 13, and I’ve been drinking coffee ever since.

—Mtr Mary

*Blowin’ in the Wind. Bob Dylan. 1962.