The Yellow Door and the God of Surprises

O woman, great is your faith!
Let it be done for you as you wish.

This last week we had a great opportunity
as a parish and school staff
to go away on a day of retreat.
It was wonderful just to be away
and to spend a day in prayer,
holding up the whole year ahead.

I introduced the theme for the year:
Flourish: Cultivating Dignity Through Presence.
And I introduced two books
that we are going to use for the year
to break open this theme:
the new encyclical by Pope Leo, Magnifica Humanitas,
and a book by Daniel Coyle called
Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment.

I divided the retreat into three movements,
and they are really powerful movements.
I want to share them with you today.
The first movement is that of presence,
of how important presence is in our life.
You have heard me talk about this many times before,
how important it is that we are present to each other.
What I mean by that is that we are genuinely present:
no devices, no distractions,
all in, in that moment.

That is probably most important
at the times when we are struggling,
or ill, or even dying.
When we are present, especially silent presence,
it is really, really powerful.
It really is a holy presence.

We broke that open,
and then I connected it to the second movement,
where Daniel Coyle brings this lovely term,
called a beautiful mess.
Our lives often have beautiful messes in them.
They do not seem so beautiful at the time,
but in fact they are transforming.
Because if we are present in those messy times,
we will find that they are turned into beautiful messes.
I would like to call it the holy mess.
I think we feel this most importantly
when things are not going well.

There is a third movement,
which I will get to in a moment,
called the God of surprises.
But let me stay with the second movement,
because we are right in the middle of it
as a parish right now.
We are about to open school,
and our construction projects from summer
have not gone so well on timing.
We plan all we want,
but it did not work out the way we had hoped.
We have a bit of a beautiful mess right here,
let’s face it.

So we are running fast to get the campus ready,
and thank God we have it ready, and we are excited.
But it has not gone as planned.
Here is what we talked about:
in the middle of this beautiful mess,
we have to be present to one another,
because that is where our discipleship really comes alive.
It is this sense that I am here,
here in the middle of this mess,
and that converts the messiness into a beauty,
into what I call this holy mess.

In today’s gospel,
this Canaanite woman comes to Jesus,
and her life is in a bit of a mess.
Her daughter is sick and dying,
and she is pleading on her behalf.
But here is where it gets messier
because Jesus turns her away.
He refuses to even talk to her.
He is silent.
And that appears to be what the disciples want.
They plead with Him to send her away.

Then He makes, and this really hard to hear, a racial slur.
He says it is not right
to take the food of the children
and throw it to the dogs.
But she persists, because she is in a mess,
and she is determined to make this into a holy mess.
She enters right into that slur.
She goes right back at Jesus and says,
but even the dogs eat the scraps
that fall from the table of the children.

Then Jesus says this beautiful phrase,
said only twice in all of Scripture:
“let it be done for you as you wish.”
Beautiful, beautiful part.
And what are we to learn out of that?
That Jesus changes His mind.
This is the extraordinary part.
Her persistence and her presence to her daughter,
because she is fighting for her daughter,
converts this moment into a beautiful mess,
a beautiful moment of the power of God.
And that brings in that third movement,
the God of surprises,
because God sometimes does seem to,
“change His mind.”

So, what are we to learn from this?
One of the gifts we need to realize
is how important presence is,
even in the messiness of our life,
but also to recognize
that God operates in different ways.
It is not on our plane at all.
We can never predict how God works.
That is why we call this last movement
the God of surprises.

Let me give you a metaphor to hold all this together.
It is a beautiful metaphor, and it really is powerful.
Daniel Coyle talks about how, when we are struggling in life,
we tend to see life in two types of doors:
green doors and red doors.

The green doors are the ones where we say,
this is what we have always done,
and we continue to do it.
And the red doors are those things
which we have never done
and we will never do.
That is just not who I am.
If somebody asked me to go, let us say, fly fishing,
well, I have never done it,
and maybe I am never going to do it.

But what Coyle suggests,
and what I suggest now, adding to this,
that there is a yellow door.
And behind that yellow door
is a God of surprises.

But what we need to do,
like the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas says,
is to have the humility and the courage
to enter through the door
when we do not know what is behind it.
Courage and humility,
especially when there is a bit of a mess in our life.
So we need to be open to the possibility
of going through the yellow door.

Now certainly as a community,
and I say this to all of us parents here today
who have children coming to school,
and to the grandparents,
I need us all to enter through the yellow door.
Because we do not know.
God has something in surprise for us here.
But it is all going to be fine.
It is all going to work out.
As Julian of Norwich says,
all will be well, all will be well, all will be well.

But we have to take the courage,
and really the humility,
to recognize that we cannot do what we have always done,
and we cannot avoid the other door.
We have got to go through some new yellow doors
as a community in the weeks ahead,
as we deal with this transition back to our campus.
We will get it finished,
and sooner rather than later, God willing.

But it is also true in all of our own lives.
What is the yellow door
that God is surprising us to open up?
Is there a person we are called to befriend
as we come back to school and meet new people?
Maybe God has given you a new yellow door.
They are not your friends now,
but maybe that is a new friendship.
And that is particularly true
for the new families and the new children
who are coming to school.

It is also true for all of us in our own lives
that we need to be open to new possibilities,
the yellow door.
So in the year ahead,
let us hold a holy presence to one another
in the beautiful and holy mess of our lives,
and let the God of surprises meet us
behind some new yellow doors in our life.

O woman, great is your faith!
Let it be done for you as you wish.