By Father Casey

I realized yesterday that I’ve done a poor job as a father. I was driving my younger daughter home from school, and she mentioned that her classmates have been talking trash all week about the coming Red River Rivalry. After a few moments I was struck by a realization: she was on the Sooners’ side. It was all I could do to keep the car in the lane. Rather than try to respond, I simply held up my horns and sang “The Eyes of Texas,” while she loudly rolled her eyes.

“What does that even mean,” she asked when I’d finished, in that tone of disdain that adolescents have when they speak to their unbelievably dumb parents. I tried in vain to offer an explanation: about accountability, and expectations, and each generation passing the torch to the next. I thought I’d done a rather good job, only to look over and see that she was less than impressed. Yet another “epic dad fail.”

As team song’s go, I will admit that my favorite is not “The Eyes of Texas.” Nor does it come from any other college or American sports team; it comes from across the pond, and the great English Premier League team Liverpool. Before and after every game, win or lose, all the fans in their stadium wrap their arms around each other and sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” It was originally written by Oscar Hammerstein for the musical Carousel, but in the 1960s Liverpool fans embraced it after a cover of the song by a local band went to number one in the UK charts. Now, 60 years later, it has become the team’s motto.

“Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone

You’ll never walk alone.”

I’ve watched videos of a stadium filled with Liverpool fans as they belt out these words before matches, and it is undeniably moving.[1] Because unlike other beloved team songs I know, the message of this song needs no explanation. And it is one that reaches far beyond a particular team’s supporters to touch on the deepest places of our souls.

Frankly, this song proclaims one of our core beliefs as Christians. When we choose the way, the truth, and the life of Christ, we are choosing to never walk alone. We belong to Christ, and that means we belong to each other. Which is why we look after each other, and pray for one another, and love one another: the people we know well and those we don’t yet know; the people who look like us and the people who seem totally different; when we feel like it and when we don’t; when we all agree and when we are divided. When we put our faith in Christ, life is no longer just about me; it’s about us. Life is no longer about what do I need or want, but who we are as a community. We don’t walk alone.

This has everything to do with the gospel story we’ll hear this weekend. A young man approaches Jesus with a question. In spite of his wealth, and in spite of his efforts to observe the letter of the law, he still feels like something is missing. So he asks Jesus, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Can you hear the isolation and independence behind his question? “What must I do?” That’s his mistake, because life with God is not an individual exercise. The Christian life is not a solo, it’s a chorus. And whenever we forget this, whenever we put all our stock in ourselves, the Kingdom of God will become that much harder to find.

Which is why Jesus answers the man the way he does. He wants the man to know the power of never walking alone. He wants him to not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. He wants this man to give away what he has for the sake of others, because he knows this man will only experience eternal life when he realizes that he doesn’t have to walk alone: he can walk with the whole family of God.

This last week I’ve been carefully reading the news about the hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. And as I write this, folks in Florida are beginning to clean up after Hurricane Milton. I’m always struck by the way people band together after such disasters. No one walks alone. There is a spirit of belonging and neighborliness and shared sacrifice. Disagreements that mattered yesterday don’t matter today. Divisions that seemed so important seem less so now.

Perhaps this is why I’ve caught myself humming “You’ll never walk alone.” It’s been a kind of unconscious prayer, a prompting by the Holy Spirit that is helping me not only admire their resilience, but realize my connection to them, and to all of you.

May we always remember that to be a friend of Christ is to be a friend of all. May we remember that to belong to Christ is to belong to one another. Through the wind and the rain, though our dreams be tossed and blown, with hope in our hearts, we never walk alone.

Fr. Casey +

[1] Check out a video of Liverpool singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” here.

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