Father Charles Puthota

Comparing the 52 Sundays of the liturgical year to a full deck of 52 playing cards, a priest said that on the last Sunday, the Feast of the solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, the last card of the deck, the King of Hearts, is held up. He went on to explain that Jesus is not the King of Clubs. A club could be a symbol of force and violence, to which Jesus’ values are diametrically opposed. He is meek and humble of heart. Jesus is not the King of Spades. A spade could be used to throw dirt on others or bury the questionable past. Always looking for others’ happiness and peace, Jesus always upholds and uplifts. Even enemies are included in his offer of forgiveness. Jesus’ life is an open book with nothing to hide, illumined resplendently by the love of his Father. Jesus is not the King of Diamonds. Diamonds stand for wealth, greed, and attachment to material possessions. Jesus embraces poverty and simplicity, calling his disciples to detachment and renunciation.

There is a charming story from the Eastern tradition about an old man planning mango saplings in rainy season. A curious neighbor asks him if he expects to eat the mangoes from those trees.

In her poem “God Knows,” British poet Minnie Louise Haskins says: “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown!’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’” King George VI quoted these comforting words of faith in his 1939 Christmas broadcast to a troubled nation of Great Britain at the outbreak of World War II. In the midst of war, terror, and evil, when everything seemed lost, people felt reassured by the call to put their hand into the hand of God. It seemed the only way forward.

A boy was flying a kite on a windy day. The kite kept going higher and higher, and after some time, it got so high that it was out of sight. A passerby, seeing the boy holding onto a string, asked him, “How do you even know that you have a kite up there?” The boy replied, “Because I can feel it.”

In Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play “Our Town,” set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners in New Hampshire, the narrator, pointing to the graves of familiar people in the cemetery, says: “Yes, an awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here. People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up to this hill… Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take ‘m out and look at ‘m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars … everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. … They’re waitin’. They’re waitin’ for something that they feel is comin’. Something important, and great. Aren’t they waitin’ for the eternal part in them to come out clear?”