By Father Timothy Gollob
Special to The Texas Catholic
There are times during Mass when the choir is holding forth with a beautiful hymn that I find myself thinking out of the box of the sanctuary. Such a musing took place during our magnificent Pentecost celebration recently.
My imagination flashed back to the events which took place in Boston after the bombings which wreaked so much havoc there. Everyone was concentrating on the race, but the security cameras and the cell phone cameras were snapping away. These images were later analyzed by the police powers and consequently the culprits were exposed right out in the open to be arrested.
An instant later my mind flipped over to the seashore at Galveston Island. Father Fred Caldwell and I were walking down the beach. Images of shells and seaweed and old fishing nets crossed my mind. There buried in the muck was a mullet which we confiscated and cut up for bait.
Then I was transported back to the altar to pray. This took a couple of minutes but then there came another break in the action.
This time I was cycling down the concrete path at the Trinity Audubon Center with Jeff Lane. We were hearing all sorts of birds and identifying many of them. But there were songs which I just couldn’t place with any known bird face from my past.
Then I realized that that was what eternity is all about. We are busy with our lives here on earth, but later we will be able to relive all the moments of our life. We will see the beach and every single item on it. All of the critters under the sand and all of the fishes in the sea will be present to us. We will hear the sounds of the shore birds and will be able to place each one in its proper species.
We will remember the night when we gazed up at the moon and saw it; but in eternity we will see past the moon and discover all the galaxies seen by the Hubble Telescope and billions and billions more.
We will meet our families and our friends and be able to understand every word they have ever said to us. And in the first trillion years of eternity we will just be starting to be fully alive.
Father Timothy Gollob is the pastor of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Oak Cliff.
