A dynamic and personal experience of God (Karl Rahner)

   People want and need to have a dynamic and personal experience of God. They want an intimate encounter and union with God.

--Karl Rahner            

Image source: Hoe Yen Tam, Moses & Burning Bush, http://theartoftam.blogspot.com/2015/05/moses-burning-bush-acrylic-painting-2015.html Quotation source

Sunday Gospel Reflection, May 30, 2021: We are children of God...

We are children of God…

But how do we live out our relationship with the Holy Trinity?

   From time immemorial, God has sought relationship with humanity – not in the aggregate sense, but individually. It has taken some time, however, for us to come to an understanding of what that relationship might look like. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds the people that the God that created them also gives them commandments by which to live – commandments which involve not a set of rules to follow, but an opening of oneself to God, that we might know his will and do it. Commandments are meant to reveal the will of God to God’s people, that they might live in his ways, with him as their God. Moses reminds the people that this invitation to relationship is extraordinary: Did anything so great ever happen before? Psalm 33 similarly stresses that God’s covenant, as expressed through God’s kindness and justice, is itself an expression of God’s love for all God has created; we must thus put our hope in God, trusting in his promises.

   Those promises will be fulfilled in the person of Jesus, who invites us to union with God, a union made possible by his death and resurrection, which gave us access to God, and by Jesus’ ascension, which enables the Holy Spirit to dwell in our hearts. By that Spirit, Paul tells the Romans, we experience adoption as sons of God and heirs with Christ. We fear death, but Christ conquered death, freeing us from fear, from the spirit of slavery, and allowing us to embrace our adoption as children of a God whose love is limitless. Jesus thus exhorts his followers in Matthew’s Gospel to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Go out, in other words, and gather all nations into this adoption, that all might be heirs, free of slavery to sin, joined in relationship and union with God and with each other in a shared life of love and connection, indeed, to a life in which love is revealed in connection, knowing he is with us, always, until the end of the age.

   The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity reminds us to open our hearts to God regularly and often, to listen to the Lord, and be present to him, to live in him and to allow him to live in us. In so doing, may we find our identity in a God whose very existence in the Trinity is an expression of divine love for all, a love – and a relationship – we are called to share with our world.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

The love that connects the Father and the Son (Bishop Robert Barron)

   The Holy Spirit’s principal sign is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that connects the Father and the Son. From all eternity, he is breathed back and forth between the Father and the Son, and hence he is nothing but love. When therefore he comes to dwell in you and me, he turns us to the path of love. On that day, you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me, and whoever loves me will be loved by the Father. 

    God has created a dynamic universe, moving restlessly and relentlessly toward a goal, and this goal has been disclosed to us in Christ: the sharing in the love between the Father and the Son. Therefore, if we wish to know the creaturely realm in all of its complexity and multiplicity, in both its coming and going, we must immerse ourselves in the stream of the Spiritus Sanctus. 

--Bishop Robert Barron, Gospel Reflection, May 11, 2020

Image source: https://fll.cc/en/inspire/want-receive-life-deepest-longing-heavenly-gifts-waiting/

O Holy Spirit (St. Augustine)

   O Holy Spirit, infuse thy grace, and descend plentifully into my heart; enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling, and scatter there thy cheerful beams.

 --St. Augustine 

Image source:  Sadao Watanabe, Pentecost (1965), https://artandtheology.org/tag/pentecost/ 

Quotation source

The great gift of God (Henri Nouwen)

   The Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised to his followers, is the great gift of God. Without the Spirit of Jesus, we can do nothing, but in and through his Spirit we can live free, joyful, and courageous lives. We cannot pray, but the Spirit of Christ can pray in us. We cannot create peace and joy, but the Spirit of Christ can fill us with a peace and joy that is not of this world. We cannot break through the many barriers that divide races, sexes, and nations, but the Spirit of Christ unites all people in the all-embracing love of God. The Spirit of Christ burns away our many fears and anxieties and sets us free to move wherever we are sent. That is the great liberation of Pentecost. 

--Henri Nouwen

Image source: P. Solomon Raj, Pentecost (1980s, batik), https://artandtheology.org/tag/pentecost/
Quotation source

A word that came from beyond fear (Deb Organ)

   It was amazing! Fire and wind brought a word that came from beyond the fear, beyond the gaps that separated those ancient people. Many of them could listen to one another for the first time.

   Today is Pentecost. Feel the wind in your hair as you sit with your daughter or son, your mother or father, maybe for the first time in a long while. Is it possible, in really listening to one another, that the love that is deeper than the gap could show itself again? Feel the wind in your hair as you move and live in our divided society, open to vision a new way forward that fosters life for everyone. Bathed in the fire of the Spirit, we know that we are capable of talking with and listening to one another. The same ancient fire that went in a column before the Israelites as they wandered the desert rests on your head as you look again at the person with whom you are most at odds.

   Today is Pentecost. The ever-new presence of God surrounding us, in the very context of our fear and hiding, is given still and again to us today and challenges us to remember.

   The power of the Spirit of the resurrected Christ has not diminished. The immense love that God showers in abundance in wind and flame has not changed, and the capacity of God to speak a word from beyond but right into our complicated and frightening reality remains real and true. 

  

   Today is Pentecost. Feel the wind in your hair. 

--Deb Organ 

Image source: https://www.htlcto.org/sermon/day-of-pentecost-worship-may-31-2020-the-power-of-difference/ 

Quotation source (& complete article)

Mary's remarkable life (Fr. James Martin)

   By the time of the Wedding Feast at Cana, Mary fully understands her son’s role. Mary’s remarkable life includes a visit from an angel, her son’s miraculous birth, supporting him during his public ministry, accompanying him at his agonizing death, and rejoicing with him at his Resurrection.

   Throughout, Mary is not afraid to ask questions, as she does in Nazareth with the Angel Gabriel; or give voice to her worries, as she does in Capernaum with Jesus; or tell people what needs to be done at Cana to the stewards: Do whatever he tells you.

   Conceived without sin, Mary is nonetheless like us in so many ways, most especially as a person who shows us what it means to accompany Jesus along the way, with deep faith and trust.

--Fr. James Martin,
Facebook, November 22, 2019

In May we honor Mary...

Image source: Wilhelm Borremans, The Miracle at Cana, detail & complete painting (1717), ceiling fresco, Church of Santa Maria dell’Amiraglio, Sicily, https://www.christianiconography.info/cana.html
or https://www.christianiconography.info/sicily/canaMartorana.html