A mosaic is made of hundreds or thousands of tiles. Each one has its own color and each one is essential, but it has to be “read” properly. By itself it’s just a stone, but the artist can place the tile in the right place. The tile can be of very different colors, some dark and some light – luminous. Each one is essential! A dark tile missing will be immediately noticed.

How do we read the mosaic and the place of the tile?

A first level of reading the tile is that it is part of a particular object of the image.
A second level is that it is part of a picture and that picture has a meaning.
A third level reads the tile in the context of all the mosaics of the Church that tell the history of salvation!

It is part of a great teaching and it is made of tiles that are no longer “single” and instead became a unity, and that unity is history.

The Knights (CL middle school students) were given the task of making a section of the mosaic of Christ feeding the lambs at the New York Encounter Infinity Lab – a place dedicated to children. There were eight panels and at the end the artist put them together and it became a single piece that was presented to the public at 3pm on Sunday. The Knights worked a lot the whole day Saturday and Sunday morning! They were great!

Our day is like a tile. It can be luminous or dark, and each piece is essential. Per se it cannot be really understood, unless it is properly read and the reading should alway be at each of the three levels described before. Reading the mosaic of our life according to those three levels is called sanctity. It is an openness of the mind and the soul that embraces and is embraced at the same time.

Trust! The trust in the Artist that we use on a daily basis is the cement that will make each tile of each day tell the story of the greater story. I might be humble enough to either understand, or to meditate on it until I see the bigger picture. We have an eternity to understand and be thankful.

At a certain point I noticed that some girls during the New York Encounter were making the feet of Jesus with the stones and I asked them to be attentive to what they were really doing. I asked them, “Do you think that Jesus is noticing that you are making His feet?” They thought for a while and then they said “yes”. “Well”, I told them, “He does not forget, and He is also very thankful! He will remember it and reward you in a way you can’t even imagine because it is in the language of God. We grasp some of it and we call it joy.”

Who ever knew that putting a tile or a series of tiles could be the source of joy? A joy that can last as long as His thank you.

Fr. Roberto, Bethesda, MD