I’m sure you’ve heard about the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. It’s breaking all box office records, and I’ve seen it myself a couple of times. One of the things I find interesting about this new Star Wars trilogy is that it begins in the same way as the original trilogy with Luke Skywalker. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’m not giving much away by saying that the main character starts the story on a desert planet feeling forsaken, feeling abandoned, just like Luke Skywalker alone on the planet Tatooine feeling left out of things, feeling abandoned by his friends who have gone off to fight in the rebellion. Now this is not unique, of course, to Star Wars. Many, many stories begin wth the main character being abandoned or forsaken. Harry Potter, for instance, is left on the Dursley doorstep as a baby where he grows up in a tiny room under the stairs, abandoned, seemingly, by any friends he might have had. There’s also Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on an island, young Pip in Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, orphans who are raised by distant family members, and Cinderella who is left abandoned when her father passes away and is forsaken, ignored, persecuted by her stepmother and stepsisters. These stories resonate with us because we can feel abandoned at times, we can feel forsaken, that we’re living as the prophet Isaiah says in a desolate land. This is especially true this time of year in January, with its grey skies and frigid temperatures. We’ve just come out of the long holiday season. The celebrating began at Thanksgiving and lasted all through November and December. And then suddenly life returns to normal. The mail has turned from Christmas cards to credit card bills. Now we’re back at work, the kids are back in school, and so life continues. It’s a bit of a let down, this time of year called Ordinary Time. It’s not meant to be humdrum, but that’s sometimes how we feel. The word Ordinary itself simply comes from the word Ordinal which means counted, it’s counted time, we count the weeks of the Church year. But maybe sometimes we feel instead that we’re counting down the days to our next vacation. And the culture around us doesn’t help, either. Sometimes we feel abandoned by the culture, abandoned by people who call us ignorant for our beliefs, or who say that we’re outdated, that the values we believe in are old-fashioned. We’re “out of touch with reality.” Sometimes this even happens on a national scale when a group is mocked or persecuted. Certainly the Jews during the Holocaust must have felt abandoned, like they were living in desolate times. In today’s world Christian Syrians and other Christians in the Middle East feel abandoned, forsaken. And so in some way we can all relate to being abandoned, of being left on our own, like Rey or Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, or Harry Potter, or Jane Eyre. That’s why the Wedding Feast of Cana is so important today, right now. For the rest of this year we will be reading from the gospel of Luke, but before we get to Luke, the Church chooses this reading from John’s Gospel to help us transition from the Christmas season to Ordinary Time. The Wedding feast of Cana reminds us that we are not forsaken, that we are not abandoned,