Our reflection verse today is one of many biblical promises of something new awaiting us. Some interpret this as the destruction of our current world, while others see it as a promise of its transformation. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this verse emphasizes what is good and loving in life, which will be redeemed and transfigured.
Our future existence is the renewal of this earth, where God’s promise means taking the current reality and bringing it to perfection. Our actions of love, justice, and kindness in this life possess an eternal, irrevocable quality that carries over into this new creation.
The “new heavens and new earth” represents the ultimate hope where all suffering, iniquity, and limitations of the current, broken world are transformed, fulfilling the longing for a paradise where God dwells among us.
Kathy McGovern reflects on the story of Edie Littlefield Sundby and her walking the El Camino Real de las Californias, the old mission trail from Loreto, Mexico, to Sonoma, California, having only one lung left and surviving widespread metastasis of stage IV gall bladder cancer.
McGovern asks, “What is the point of it all, a dying woman forcing herself through often desolate and harsh landscapes in order to reach another mission, some of them decrepit and long abandoned?”
McGovern writes that we might see Sundby’s journey as an excruciating exercise in nostalgia. Yet, unseen in all of this is what God is doing in her tormented body. As she pushes herself on to every single mission site (some still in use, most in ruins), she is being healed. She lives today, twelve years after her diagnosis and six years after setting out on her journey.
Of this stunning pilgrimage, Sundby says: “If I was walking, I was alive.” Might that be what the Spirit is saying to us today as Church, as the People of God? We are all “under construction” in one way or another. God is doing something new. Keep walking, Church, keep walking, People of God. It just might be that God is healing us too.
