After This Our Exile

After This Our Exile

Closing out the month of the Holy Rosary and reflecting on our lives as an analogy for the matrix, I began to ponder that our consciousness will most certainly live on in the heavenly dimension because that is our real and true destiny. But for now we live in exile.

While recently praying the rosary, I was struck by words in the Hail Holy Queen. We are indeed “the banished children of Eve”. I never thought of myself as banished. But we have been banished from paradise until we have been purified and have sufficiently participated in Christ’s redemption of all souls for us to be permitted entry into the paradise He has prepared for us.  It will be something so extraordinary that our small minds can’t even begin to imagine it.

“After this our exile”, the prayer asks Mary to “show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus”. As Americans, few of us have ever experienced exile.  To be banished from your homeland, never to return to that place which shaped your total identity and sense of self, were created and nurtured, and loved is a daily suffering. Yet when we are very still, we can sense, deep inside that this is not our permanent home.  Somehow we are in exile.  Yet most of us on most days are completely unaware that we do in fact live as exiles from our heavenly home, from our Father! We know only dimly the language of Heaven and there is a longing in the depths of our being that is hard to name and harder to satisfy. Often we try to fill that hole with earth’s pleasures, flitting from one relationship to another but always coming up empty.  

In this prayer we ask Mary to reveal to us the fruit of her womb, Jesus. Reveal Jesus to us. We know the  Jesus of history through Scripture. We know that he died for us. We know his deeds and his words. It’s not unlike how we may know stories of our grandparents. We may know about them but we do not know them as persons. 

This is how most of us know Jesus. We know about him but we don’t really know him as a living person.  In this prayer we ask Mary to reveal her son to us, to help us to have a true relationship with him. Faith tells us that he is indeed living and present in our midst but we don’t recognize him. The longing in our hearts will never be filled by anything or anyone but him.

Even though we’ve prayed all our lives, or maybe  question why we don’t know Jesus like the apostles did i can say that in my experience, the closest I’ve come is while sitting silently at adoration;  no reading, no reciting prayers. Just silence. I tell him i believe he is present before me and I want to hear what he has to say to me. Sometimes I get a word and sometimes we sit in companionable silence like two old folks who know each other well. Words are superfluous. Here the exile and banishment are diminished. I am home.After