Rediscover It, By Brian Flanagan, Fiat Ventures

“Rediscover It”

By Brian Flanagan, Fiat Ventures

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Shortly after Christmas this year, my brother and I were hanging out in our parents’ basement, and we started going through some old drawers and cabinets.  We came across pictures of us when we were little, VHS tapes of recorded TV shows (go look up VCR on Wikipedia if you don’t know what those are), and finally we hit the jackpot.

We found our old Sega Genesis video game console.  This was early 90s classic that had the first appearance of Sonic the Hedgehog – which if you’ve never played, you can probably download on your phone right now!

We played for a few hours and were transported back to our childhood.  I made my brother take “Player 2” as I always did when we were little since I was older and demanded that I be “Player 1”, and we had a blast.  Sure, the graphics were laughable sometimes, with giant pixels floating around on the big HDTV, but that didn’t matter to us.  We felt like we were really rediscovering something.

The First Reading from Mass this Sunday, believe it or not, has practically the same thing going on.  In this Old Testament reading from Nehemiah, they certainly weren’t dusting off their old Super Nintendo though.  So what were they rediscovering? It wasn’t Super Mario Bros; they were rediscovering the law of God and the scriptures.

See, the people of Israel (well technically of the people Judah since by this point in history Israel had subdivided a bit due to folks conquering them) had been exiled in Babylon for several generations, and now they had finally returned home.  They had held onto their faith to a degree, but their usual worship routine was completely disrupted.  So when this priest Ezra takes out the book of the law and starts proclaiming it in the assembly, the people can’t get enough.  They’re even moved to tears because they’re rediscovering what was lost.  They’re getting back to the basics of their faith, and they don’t want to let it go this time.

One of my favorite authors, Matthew Kelly, has written several books with this idea in mind; namely Rediscover Catholicism and Rediscover Jesus.  I think we could all do some rediscovering of certain aspects of our faith.  Maybe you go to Mass every week but you haven’t dusted off your Bible in your bedroom in a while.  Rediscover it.  Maybe you haven’t been to confession in 6 months, 5 years, or 30 years.  Rediscover it.  Maybe you used to grab the rosary from time to time before bed and pray a few decades until you fell asleep.  Rediscover it.  And when you rediscover these things, don’t be surprised if you can’t get enough.