We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time. - TS Eliot

This Sunday's story speaks of two disciples, who after Good Friday, abandon the way of Jesus and make a sorrowful journey back to their home village perhaps – a place called Emmaus.

What is equally important is the place that these disciples are running from, “ Jerusalem ”. Ah Jerusalem ! It is a place of conflict and failure. The city where the prophets die. Like in other post-resurrection stories, the encounter of the disciples with the risen Lord transforms their outlook.

At the end of the story, they return to their difficult reality, this time with renewed zeal, their vision completely changed – seeing “ Jerusalem ” as if for the first time , as in the quotation above from TS Eliot. Indeed, this is a story for anyone who has to endure the death of a precious dream and seeks to escape, however temporarily, from “ Jerusalem ”.

The story evoked for me the memory of a journey I have made a number of times with the faithful, clergy and religious of the Artibonite in Haiti where I lived and worked for three years. Much like Cleopas, we often found ourselves at our assemblies and formation meetings, mulling over the spectacular failure of some project or the other in which we had invested much hope, love and energy.

Our difficult reality was that the countryside was littered with the debris of countless failed development projects, cooperatives, self-help groups, agricultural projects and farmers' organisations all established to take our people out of spiritual and material poverty.

The story was similar in most cases. We would start with great fanfare: “ great things … said and done in the sight of God and of the whole people ”.

But then like Jesus, our “ chief priests ” and our “ leaders ” handed him (the project) over to be sentenced to death. For us, our chief priests and leaders were those negative tendencies such as individualism, intolerance, selfishness, suspicion, lack of self-confidence, conflictual relations, often found among our ( Caribbean ) people.

These evils could put any project to death, but like Cleopas we said of our well thought-out plans: “ our own hope had been that he (it) would be the one to set Israel free ”.

It is touching to recall that the very fact of coming together to tell our stories of failure brought us a sense of solidarity as we huddled in our churches, chapels and meeting halls on the mountains and among the rice paddies of the Artibonite.

We realised at these meetings that in the midst of it all, there was evidence that our hopes and dreams, though battered, were still alive. Even as projects were dying, new ones were constantly being born. This is much like the women who astounded Cleopas and the other disciples.

In the story, Jesus, after listening quietly to Cleopas' sad story goes on to situate this story in the Bible: “ starting with Moses and going through the prophets, he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures that were about himself. ”

In a similar way, our pooling of our individual stories helped us to understand that our story was not simply one of senseless suffering, but was an experience that was shared by many other people.

Our struggle was not in vain because it was the struggle of Jesus. Like the disciples, who recognised Jesus at the end of the journey, we came to understand that Jesus was in our midst because he was in our story and our story was in his story.

Our spirits were lifted and we could “ set off that instant and return to Jerusalem ” to the same reality from which we had temporarily withdrawn. We would leave these meetings seeing in a new way, with a new sense of commitment, knowing now that we were not fighting alone.

Gospel Prayer

Lord, sometimes we find ourselves walking alone in the twilight of our failure, thinking and talking about “all that had happened”: a broken marriage, a failure at school or work, the death of a group to which we belong. Send us Jesus, silent and gentle. Send us Jesus, to “walk by our side” and listen quietly to us as we pour out our broken hearts. Send us someone Lord, who would help us to make sense of our story so that we could “believe the full message of the prophets”. Let our hearts “burn within us” and fill us with new zeal so that we may set off at once and return to Jerusalem , our faith renewed.

Gospel Meditations for April are by Spiritan Fr Dexter Brereton, parish priest of Toco/Matelot.