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Connections&
May 21, 2000
Fifth Sunday of Easter
"Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches."
John 15:1-8
Superman continues to soar
On Memorial Day 1995, actor Christopher Reeve was thrown headfirst from his horse in an accident that broke his neck and left him unable to move or breathe.
In the five years since that horrible day, Reeve, best known for starring in the title role in the three Superman movies, has not only survived but has fought for himself, his family, and for the hundreds of thousands of people with spinal cord injuries in the United States and around the world. The man who cannot move has not stopped moving: he has established a charitable foundation to raise awareness and money for research on spinal cord injuries. His speeches at the Democratic National Convention and the Academy Awards and his testimony before Congress have inspired people around the country and the world.
In his book Still Me and in his many speeches, the actor talks about an important lesson he has learned since that horrible day at a Virginia horse farm:
"Anything can happen to anybody. In the last movie I did, Above Suspicion, I played a paraplegic. I went to a rehab center and I worked with the people there so I could simulate being a paraplegic. And every day I would get in my car and drive away and go 'Thank God that's not me.' I remember the smugness of that, as if I were privileged in a way. And seven months later, I was in this condition. The point is, we are all one great big family, and any one of us can get hurt at any moment& we should never walk by somebody who's in a wheelchair and be afraid of them or think of them as a stranger. It could be us-- in fact, it is us."
CONNECTION: Christopher Reeve has discovered in his new life's work the truth of what Jesus tells his disciples in today's gospel (at the Last Supper, the night before he died): We are connected to one another, we belong to one another, we are branches of the same vine planted by God the vinegrower. In the love of Christ, we are grafted to one another in ways we do not completely realize or understand. As Christopher Reeve has learned, we are not strangers but family -- the only differences are the circumstances and challenges of our individual lives. In the spirit of Easter transformation may we have the wisdom and love to realize and rejoice in our belonging to each and every person who, like us, is a child of God, the vinegrower.
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