Many Rooms, One Heart: Finding Meaning in Community and Tradition
Fifth Sunday of Easter – May 3, 2026
Our First reading shows how the early Church addressed a critical physical need in the community 2,000 years ago. The world still, today, has increasing numbers of people starved of physical food. However, there is a greater hunger, articulated by Mother Teresa like this:
But the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, having no one…
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread…
AZ Quotes: Mother Teresa Quotes About Hunger
How does that reveal itself today? Isn’t it strange that those who suffer physical hunger often join together to support one another? Yet those of us with food, and money, often drift away from community to do things alone.
There is a place for that, to establish our identity. But equally, we need to keep one foot anchored in community so we don’t lose the experience of giving and receiving the LOVE we need to have meaning in our lives.
Victor Frankl describes our modern hunger like this: the existential vacuum is a twentieth-century phenomenon in which many people feel that life is meaningless… An existential vacuum manifests itself primarily through boredom, which then leads to distress. Frankl notes, …that many people become distressed on Sundays when they are not so busy and have time to contemplate the meaning of their lives. Those living in such a vacuum often try to fill this void with sex or money. LitCharts: Man’s Search for Meaning: Logotherapy: The Existential Vacuum
We know from the latter parts of the Gospels that the disciples, after the crucifixion, were afraid, had given up hope and gone fishing, or walked away from Jerusalem (Road to Emmaus).
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is preparing the disciples for his departure which, we know, was traumatic and confusing for them. They had developed a very powerful meaning for their lives: they had left everything and followed Jesus. And, now, Jesus has disappeared!
Married life has a similarity here when two people are deeply in love and one dies. A lovely lady in Adelaide, South Australia, shared birthday greetings on Facebook to her deceased husband who would have been 90. He died 25 years ago, but she penned these words:
“To the love of my life… celebrating your 90th birthday in heaven; miss you always but your love remains in my heart.”
These words are more profound and meaningful than she might have realised when writing them. This is a great challenge for us today: as we grow older, to allow our work, physical experiences and relationships from the past, to be transformed into a deeper purpose within our hearts. These transformations fill our heart with the necessary energy to maintain meaningfulness in our lives even when we lose the physical things which were important to us.
How do these transformations happen? There are probably many ways, but two of them are definitely: a sense of appreciation for what we have, and what others do for us; and secondly, by cultivating or participating in traditions with family, Church and community.
Victor Frankl continues the dialogue like this: once, man was able to overcome great loss by relying on tradition but, in the twentieth century, these traditions are falling away.
The two ways of transformation mentioned above are symbiotic: that is, true appreciation moves us to participate in community and family affairs. While tradition helps us appreciate.
The world, today, has never changed faster in material and political senses, and this is causing profound challenges for younger generations, especially, to find meaningfulness in their lives: everything is moving, like shifting sands in the desert, making it easy to feel nothing is certain.
However, one thing that is stable, unchanging and always open is the Church. The Church traditions are designed to hold us in healthy Community where there is give and take. This is the beginnings of Heaven on Earth: and whether it grows into something more loving, caring and helpful (like Heaven above), depends on how much we give of ourselves.
Tradition requires consistency: consistency creates reliability: reliability encourages investment by others; which strengthens the whole community. Along the journey, traditions draw us out of ourselves, out of our sadness, fears and worries, to be united with others: traditions help us appreciate the fact that we need community, and community needs us. Feeling needed is essential to building a sense of meaningfulness.
The Gospel reminds to us beautifully that our individualism, all our different ways of contributing to, and being in, community will be accommodated by God in Heaven: “there are many rooms in my Father’s house.” It is not about capacity, but it speaks loudly about variety, and how our variety is essential to keep renewing our communities and personal lives. Believe it, today: you are essential for our community to grow and be renewed; to be healthy.
At times we can feel a bit overwhelmed by all that needs to be done in community life, but as Mother Teresa also said, If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one. But, whatever you do, make sure you reserve one of the many rooms in Heaven by developing traditions that connect us with community: especially the community that never moves: the Church.
By Gerard Conlan, OMI