Are Not Our Hearts Burning Within Us?
A quiet traveler joined two broken-hearted disciples on the road home. At the table, the bread snapped open. Pope Leo XIV preached it in Kilamba this morning, and this reflection is what came out.
Dear friends,
Letters from Leo is publishing Easter Sunday reflections through Pentecost, available exclusively to paid subscribers.
This series is a quiet walk through the seven weeks of Easter — a season of resurrection, recognition, and the long work of believing that Jesus is alive and among us. These reflections meet the risen Christ in the gospels, in the witness of Pope Leo XIV, and in the broken places of our own lives.
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That very day, the first day of the week, two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. — Luke 24:13–16
The strangest thing about this decade of American life is that a person can love his country, his party, and his Church all at once, and still wake up most mornings feeling quietly exiled from each of them.
That is where I have been much of the past decade. Worn down rather than furious. I often write about this country like a man watching people he loves drift out of reach. The rooms I used to belong to feel different now. The estrangement runs both ways.
Today’s gospel finds two men in the same posture.
They are walking away from Jerusalem with, in Pope Leo XIV’s phrase this morning in Kilamba, “broken and sad hearts.” Leo preached that homily to a hundred thousand people in the plaza of a young African capital.
The disciples are leaving a city of crucifixion. They had hoped Jesus would redeem Israel and are now reckoning with the collapse of that hope. They do not yet know that the stranger at their elbow is the answer to every prayer they have stopped praying.
Leo told the Angolans, who know what it is to walk out of a city ruined by war, that the risen Jesus “walks the path with you and breaks himself as bread for you.” That was the whole of the sermon. Christ finds the disciples on the road they are using to leave.
No one summons them back to Jerusalem first. He is already the stranger at their elbow, asking what they have been talking about and listening as the sun tips toward the horizon.
And then comes the breaking of the bread. And that changes everything. Here’s what I mean.
