Cheez Dippers

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; 1 Pt 3:15-18; Jn 14:15-21

May 10, 2026

(Mother’s Day)

Following St. Peter’s suggestion in our second reading, I want to give you a reason for my hope and my experience of the Holy Spirit. It’s kind of a funny story.

A few years back, at an important crossroads of my life, I was on a 30-day retreat called the Spiritual Exercises. I was maybe five or six days in and feeling frustrated. I couldn’t pray. I didn’t know how to pray as I ought. The exercise was praying to receive the grace of a heartfelt awareness of God’s love and care in the concrete details of my life. My retreat director, wisely, would not let me move on to the next spiritual exercise until I received that grace. I said, How will I know? What am I supposed to feel? I’ve never experienced charismatic gifts; is that even what’s supposed to happen?

Feeling I was about to waste the next four weeks of my life, I wandered back to my room to get a snack that my mom insisted on packing even though I was 28 years old. The name of the snack was Cheez Dippers™, the little breadsticks with fake cheese. And I just began to laugh, and to cry, at the same time. I laughed though nothing was funny. I cried though I wasn’t sad. I just simply recognized, in Cheez Dippers, how much my mom and God loved me.

The laughing went on for a while, and as it did, what popped into my head was the brand of cheese in the dippers. It was the same brand that my grandmother, who was from France, knew I loved when I was little and used to buy for me when I spent the night at her house. It’s a French brand of cheese called “Le Vache Qui Rit,” the Laughing Cow.

Her house was full of cows, her favorite animal, reminding her of the French countryside where she grew up. At that point in my life, my vocation, when I was accustomed to taking myself so seriously and needing all the answers, God gave me the grace of Cheez Dippers to show me I’m just a laughing cow. Since then, it’s been my best theological definition of grace: grace is Cheez Dippers.

Grace, we know as a gift of the Holy Spirit, a heartfelt awareness of God’s love and care in the concrete details of my life. The story of how I’ve been loved. Grace is an awareness of love so consuming that you feel embarrassed.

Parents, do you ever love your sons and daughters so much they feel embarrassed? You can’t but help love them in public places? That’s what happens in the Acts of the Apostles, from the Upper Room at Pentecost spilling out into the surrounding towns. “Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed the Christ to them . . . and saw the signs he was doing. For unclean spirits, crying out in a loud voice, came out of many possessed people, and many paralyzed or crippled people were cured. There was great joy in that city. . . Then they laid hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:5-8).

As we grow up, we come to believe if I accept being loved like that no one will take me seriously. We resist God’s Holy Spirit of love not because his grace is found wanting. We resist God because the Holy Spirit is a love so embarrassing and undeserved it leaves us feeling exposed and powerless. God loves us uncomfortably. We want it to stop. As we resist grace, the fatherly and motherly love of God, we become like orphans.

Jesus said to his disciples, “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. . . And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him” (Jn 14:18).

It was on that day that I realized that I am in the Father because I am in the Son and the Son is in me.

When it comes to God’s grace, I am not “special,” even if my mom still says so. Jesus actually loves you too and will reveal himself to you. Just ask Him, that is, if you aren’t too “grown up for God.” You are not spiritual orphans but adopted and reborn children of God. You will discover your reason for hope, and there will once more be great joy in our church and our city.