God Draws us. How?

As I was praying over the readings this weekend, especially the Gospel and that phrase of Jesus, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him," I started thinking how does the Father draw us? For whatever reason, I thought of a girl I knew 42 years ago when I taught at a girls' academy that was a boarding school.
This young girl ran away from the school one weekend with a soldier from Fort Harrison. That was quite an upset for a small girls’ academy. Finally, the police found her out of state, and her father went to pick her up. They lived out of town and the following Sunday, he brought her down to talk with me
She described a scene where they were driving along the highway. It was early morning, she looked off to the right and saw the sun rising through the field, and she said she knew everything would be all right. Then she smiled and looked at me and said, "Maybe someday I'll discover that you can find God in church."
In my years as a priest I've met many people who think they don't pray. They think they don't pray because they don't say prayers. They think they don't pray because they don't have experiences that are overtly religious in the sense that the content of their thought is our doctrine or some belief that we have. But i f you listen to them for very long, you know that prayer is happening in their life.
You know it's happening, like with that young girl when she saw the sunrise over a field. It happens sometimes when we notice some little beauty or some thing that we haven't noticed before. It happens when we have feelings of being at one with God's creation. It happens when we feel something drawing us to an awareness of our brothers and sisters and the unity we have with them.
Do you know what I mean? Would you agree with me that those moments are moments of prayer? We may not think of God, we may not think of an explicit religious concept, but I like to think in those moments God is praying in us, and that there is deep within our heart a prayer that is going on constantly. I like to think that in those moments God is drawing us to God's self.
There's a very old and ancient saying attributed to God, and I forget where it came from or who attributed it to God, but the saying goes like this: You wouldn't be looking for me if I hadn't already found you.
I like that and would like to call our attention to it today. When we broaden our consciousness of life, I think we become aware of many ways and many times in which prayer happens in our life. When it happens, sometimes it feels like it's us praying, sometimes it feels like somebody else is praying in us.
Now, how can I tie that together with the Gospel? I believe that the Eucharist we celebrate is broad enough to encompass all those feelings, to be a home for them and to be their fulfillment.
I was reading about a homily of Pope Benedict in the National Catholic Reporter last week. It's one of those liberal Catholic newspapers that I would highly recommended to you, because you'll read all the news about what's happening in the church that you won't read elsewhere.
When I was in my 20s there was aJesuit priest and a paleontologist who had a very mystical sense of evolution and of the whole world evolving toward union with God in Christ. He had an image that one day the whole world would be a cosmic host that we offered to God on the altar.
Well, needless to say, his writings were quickly looked upon with suspicion, and people criticized him for many things. But much to my joy, when I was reading National Catholic Reporter, I noticed that Pope Benedict XVI quoted him in a homily on July 24 when he was on vacation, at a vesper service commenting, and he said this is the vision that Teilhard de Chardin had: That the whole cosmos would be an offering to God, and this is the kind of priest we should try to be, that all of creation becomes awake and alive to God and worshipping God through us.
Well, in the Gospel Jesus says he's the bread of life. This writer, Teilhard de Chardin, said that, yes, God touches us in the Eucharist under the symbol of bread, but he touches us through all of creation. And in this Eucharist God really is feeding us with the bread of life, and in the Eucharist we really are all coming together into one people.
Anyway, just think of that today when you look at the host.
I digress: this is the same Pope who's gone green and who installed solar panels in the Vatican, and who has begun teaching that care for the environment needs to be right up there among our concern as Christians, and has somehow become a green Pope, and in his latest encyclical about the church's social teaching that was released right before he met with president Obama. It drove some people up the wall, because they thought he was endorsing socialism. And of course, you know the church has never endorsed capitalism and has always taught us that we are interconnected.
Anyway, maybe I threw out more than you can handle in one day, and if I did, good. If it bothers you, good. Think about it, and maybe think about those areas and movements in your life where the Father may be drawing you closer to Jesus.
The vision presented to us in the Eucharist, in the writings of the mystics and seemingly acknowledged by the Pope is that the whole of creation is being drawn together by God into one cosmic unity, one host offered to the Father through Jesus. Think of it. Maybe those moments of prayer that you don’t consider prayer are part of this movement of God’s Spirit in God’s creation.