When I was a little kid, we lived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in a little town of 4,000 called Placerville--Leavenworth without the tchotksies. Every year we had one treat during the long, hot pre-air-conditioned California summer. We got to go to Sacramento, the Spokane of California, for the state fair.
I have vivid recollections of the fair: food and rides, hawkers selling slicers and dicers, animals large and small, fireworks and the Dancing Waters at night. It seemed an immense world. At the center of the fairgrounds was the Big Building, the Counties Building, a long two story shed of a building with a rotunda in the middle. Each of California’s 58 counties had its exhibit. I still remember the sweet smell of Colusa County’s peaches, and the tang of fresh cut pine from my own, beloved El Dorado county
The fair was wonderful: so much to see, to linger over. It was also a little scary, so many big people. The fairgrounds seemed huge and complicated, and I was little, and, admittedly, a dreamy, klutzy little kid, prone to wandering.
Whenever we went to the State Fair, there was one commandment given and received. “When you get lost, come back to the Golden Bear in front of the Counties Building, and WAIT there.” Not “IF you get lost, but WHEN you get lost…” Every year, every single time, I got lost, separated from my mom and sister. Every year, I ended up at the Golden Bear, a little panicked that they would leave without me. There was always a crowd of lost, crying children there, and exasperated parents trying to sort them out. Every year my mom would show up, a little annoyed but not surprised, and take me by the hand for a while and lead me around and get me something to eat. And then I’d get lost again, and come back to the golden bear.
Today’s readings tell us a similar story. About being lost, lost in the desert of the world, lost in the midst of questions and unbelief. The readings tell us too about having a place of where we know we will be found; a place to return to from our wandering, lingering, erring. The scriptures identify that place for us: not a golden bear, or a golden calf or a golden idol, but this table set for by Jesus, son of the living God, where he feeds us with his body and blood, with his very self. “Lord, to whom should we go: you alone have the words of everlasting life.”
We know that our complicated life is like a State Fair of full of distractions, full of food and rides, hawkers selling slicers and dicers, animals large and small, fireworks and sometimes even the Dancing Waters at night. Yet the reality is simpler: God loves us like a mother who may get a little exasperated with us, but always finds us. And God, mother and father of us all finds us most easily not at the golden bear, but at this golden table.
“Lord, to whom should we go? You alone have the words of everlasting life.”
Rev. Thomas Lucas, S.J.