Hip Bone Connected to the...

Friday of Week 20 in Ordinary Time

Saint John Eudes

Ezekiel 37:1-14

“And God said / Shall these bones live?”

TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Yesterday we heard:

I will take away

I will gather

I will bring you back

I will sprinkle

I will cleanse

I will give you a new heart

And a new spirit

I will take your stony hearts

I will give you natural hearts

You shall be my people and I will be your God

Today Ezekiel walks among the very dry and brittle bones that are Israel.  Only God knows if they can live again.  God tells Ezekiel to prophesy. Tell them to receive the breath of God and put on sinews!  Tell them to get back together…make skeletons.  Eventually God tells Ezekiel to prophesy for the breath to enter the bodies…ahhh at last, LIFE!

There is nothing that God cannot bring back to life…even a whole people!  But I respect Eliot’s ever-present skepticism.  It seems to me a skepticism about our human response.  Shall these bones live?  I mean live and flourish?  Our freedom, always in tact, demands our constant response (one way or another) to the love of God.

My prayer is often too personal…I forget that I am a part of a ‘people.’ All of us dry bones trying to hear the Word of the Lord.  EZ 37:4

(This reading always makes me think of that song ‘Dem Bones’ from my childhood…which I never did connect to Ezekiel!)