Stones, Sacraments and Skin-in-the-Game

            When I was a boy, I’d walk into the house with pockets bulging with stones and pebbles, precious gems to a boy growing up on a Midwest farm with dirt lanes, creek banks and a gravel barnyard.
            My mother would make me empty my pockets outside the kitchen door. When she wasn’t looking, I’d go back and choose one or two of the stones and add them to the collection accumulating atop my bedroom dresser.
            Eventually, I started collecting baseball cards.
            Many years later, after moving to Texas, I started collecting rocks again. How could I not? I live near the base of the Llano Estacado, a region covered with shards of Tecovas Jasper, flint-like stones that glisten with shades of soft rose and blood-warm burgundy. Every shelf in my house is crowded with them.
            Neither Scripture nor Tradition bears a story of Mary instructing Jesus to empty his pockets at the door of their Nazareth home, yet the childhood impulse to touch and hold that which draws the eye and stirs the soul is reflected in the Lord’s subsequent tendency to augment his teaching with his touch.  He placed his hands on children in benediction, anointed the eyes of the blind and examined the ears of deaf. He reached for the hand of a girl on her death bed and said, “Talitha koum! Little girl, get up!” He griped the hand of Peter when he pulled him from the waves, and remarked, “Oh, you of little faith!.” He washed the feet of his apostles on the night before he died and commanded, “As I done, so you must do.”
           When it comes to the most important things in life, words alone are never enough, touch is required. Like children gathering stones, we long to touch that for which we long: communion with God.
            Of the countless stones that clutter my house, a jasper rock rests next the rosary on my nightstand. During the day, the stone rides in my pocket alongside a buck knife and truck keys.
            I found it near the hay bunk while feeding my horses. It was the Third Sunday of Easter, the day when the gospel tells the story of St. Thomas touching the scars on the body of the risen Christ.
            The surface of this stone is as smooth as skin. At its center, an indentation red as blood.
            The words of the Bible, as important as they are, can never be enough. Christ speaks to us in Scripture, but He embraces in the Sacraments.
            Communion requires touch. Think of it as having “skin in the game.” 
            An element of touch also helps in ordinary, day-to-day prayer. Hence the rock in my pocket. It is nothing more than a feedlot stone, yet I pray it heralds the day when a welcome look in Christ’s eyes belies the chide on his lips: “Oh, Luke. You, of little faith!”