Last weekend I was on a three-day silent retreat with the Trappist monks at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville. I went out for a walk as soon as I got there on Friday. The green fields are rocky rolling hills filled with livestock. They could easily be Ireland and I think I thought out loud, "This is Heaven." But it wasn't fifteen minutes later that I was sitting in the chapel waiting for the monks to enter to give a prayer that I heard an unnerving buzzing sound.

Apparently even Heaven has stinkbugs.

I looked around and saw one. It was buzzing around the light fixture. And one on the wall, and about twenty or so climbing on the window next to me and OK make that a dozen on the wall! I looked around and there were stinkbugs crawling on the pews and stinkbugs flying around (and who knew these things could fly anyway?!) and landing in people's hair without them knowing and I looked over, and there was one sitting right next to me, creepy looking, and it was marching right toward me with a very determined look, like we were in the gunfight at the OK Corral.

Well, I did what any good urban Christian would do. I got up out of there ASAP, brushing off my clothes, running out the door! I double-timed it back to the retreat house, I did a very thorough stinkbug inspection, squashed the one I found, and proceeded to fortify the room and barricade the door against an all-out potential stinkbug onslaught. I put the towel under the door and covered up the drain with the bathmat and checked the caulk on the windows. I probably went overboard, but bugs in my hair are disconcerting to me.

When I was confidant I had adequately secured my room, only then did I realize what I'd done.

I'd taken my already secluded cell and I'd made it impenetrable. Not even a bug that could flatten itself to the thinness of a sheet of paper could enter. And that's where I stayed for three days to rest, rejuvenate, and contemplate Lent.

I might add the irony was not lost on me that the book I'd brought to escape from the chains of outside life, wasn't purchased in a Christian bookstore like everyone else's books, but was in fact Harry Potter and the Prisioner of Askaban. I had to laugh at myself and thought, "appropriate."

But as I settled into the weekend, a foggy thought began to take shape in the utter silence of my cell. Just two simple words: "Lost," and "Seek." In two simple questions:

"What have you lost?" and "What do you seek?"

I thought about those two questions for the whole day Saturday, not allowing myself to try to answer or write a word about them. Part of the thought belonged to me. But the part that didn't was like a whisper; like an echo on the wind that's hard to hear unless you want to and you strain to.

It was like hearing and feeling and sensing a thought all at once, and it said only, "What you've lost you've gotten back."

And this was a thought that has never occurred to me before, but when I heard it, I immediately knew it was true. I lost my relationship with father when I was a boy and my parents divorced. I didn't see him much for a long time, but I got him back. Later in life, due to difficult circumstances I lost my relationship with my mother too when her second husband died, but after some years I got her back too. At times in my life, I've lost myself to the extent that friends have had to summon the courage to tell me I had. But I got myself back, eventually. I've lost my faith but I've gotten that back too. Every Good Friday I lose my God, but I see Jesus every Easter.

So why is it so hard to believe? Any of it. That there's a Heaven? That we're going to see our parents again? It happens all the time! When we're young and lose our toys we look for them until we find them. When we're older and we lose our innocence we look for it until we find it too, and it takes decades, but it does happen.

So here's the question: What if losing and seeking is the secret.? What if you have to lose to find? It sounds simple, but wrap your head around that.

You have to not-have to seek. And, You have to have-had to want to seek. So to seek, you have to have lost. Lazy couch potatoes with their cushions stuffed with cash will seldom seek for much. But let me ask this question. Is it possible, that we had to lose Jesus to seek him? To have-had him, and not-have him? And is it possible, that in seeking him, we become him.?

Is it possible that he knew that. That we'll become what we seek.

If you seek good, you'll become good.
If you seek beauty, you'll become beautiful.
If you seek love, you'll become lovely.
If you seek friendship, you'll become friends.
If we seek re-memberment we will become a body.

It's the trying that facilitates the transformation. (And this is the one and only time I'll ever say this, but Yoda had it all wrong!) There is no, "Do or do not," there's only the trying. "Seek and you will find," is a promise. It means what we commit ourselves to seeking we will become. Our love, our mothers, our God, in ourselves.

That is why it is absolutely essential that we ask, and that we know, "What are we seeking? What have we lost?" If St. Thomas' Parish is seeking community we will become a community. If St. Thomas is seeking a display of the awesome miracle of faith, against odds, then by God it will become a display of the awesome miracle of faith!

If what we seek together is Jesus, then we become Jesus. And isn't that the point.

When I was sitting in my cell at the Abbey last weekend I didn't hear anything else. Just that, "There's nothing you've lost that you haven't gotten back." And isn't that the point.?

Thanks be to God.