Maps Folded the Wrong Way
Updated: Sep 2
“While they were talking and discussing together,
Jesus himself drew near and went with them.”Luke 24:15
You open the map and the creases are not where they used to be. Someone folded it differently last time. The roads no longer meet the way you remember.
You turn it around, then around again, trying to find the old pattern. For a moment the whole landscape feels slightly wrong.
Living between places does this to the inner map as well. The landmarks shift. What once felt like the centre becomes an edge. What was once far away is now next door.
Jesus sent his friends out with more trust than clear directions. They learned the roads by walking them. They also got lost. After the Cross, two of them took the road to Emmaus, sure that they already knew what the story meant. Their map was neat, and it was wrong. Christ did not shout the right route from far away. He came up beside them and walked.
Most of us carry several maps at once. One from childhood. One from the country we left. One from the place we now call home. They do not always agree. Sometimes you follow the wrong crease and end up where you did not mean to go. Sometimes that unfamiliar road is the one you needed.
You do not have to force the map back into its old folds.
The Mass is for people whose maps have been folded wrongly. We come with old memories of God, of home, of ourselves. Then the Word is opened, and the bread is broken, and the landscape looks different. We do not receive a perfect diagram of the rest of life. We receive a companion for the next stretch of road.
Let the map open as it is. The land is still real, even when the paper no longer matches your memory of it.
You are still allowed to find your way.