For God is not immobile and closed in on himself, but activity, communion, a dynamic relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which opens up to humanity and to the world. This dynamism of God’s inner life gives birth to life.
--Pope Leo XIV
Image source: Perichoresis, Rothschild Canticles (ca. 1300), https://artandtheology.org/tag/perichoresis/
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The Blessed Virgin Mary does not have many words in the Bible, but each one of them is significant. In particular, Mary's last recorded words are extremely important and are in fact directed at all of us.
The Gospel of John contains Mary's last recorded words and they occur in the context of the Wedding Feast at Cana: His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” John 2:5
Mary’s words are profound and can provide an entire lifetime of meditation. Her words, “Do whatever he tells you,” apply to not only the waiters at the feast, but also to every Christian throughout history.
Her mission has always been to point others to her son, Jesus, and to urge them to follow his commands. Mary leads others to Christ and speaks those words to us today. These words also summarize every single Marian apparition since her assumption into Heaven. In each private apparition, she calls the world to repentance and to follow her son, Jesus.
Furthermore, these words highlight the need for action in our lives of discipleship. It’s not enough to simply profess our faith in Jesus Christ, we must also live it out, following Jesus’ every word.
If we want to follow Mary, we must first of all, listen to her Son.
--Philip Kosloski
In May we honor the Blessed Virgin Mary…
Image source: Corita Kent, at cana of galilee (1952), http://www.portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=22543;type=101#
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From the beginning of time, humankind has had trouble capturing an image of our ineffable God. In the Book of Exodus, when Moses goes back up Mount Sinai, taking along the two new stone tablets on which the Lord will again write his commandments, God proclaims his name and then offers three important insights into his own identity: he is the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. Having stood with the Lord, Moses can invite him to come along with them on their journey through the desert and receive them as his own. In this scene, we do not get a complete picture of God in God’s fullness, but we do get a sense of what it means to experience the presence of God in a grace-filled moment of theophany on the mountain.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus tries to help the Pharisee Nicodemus to understand that God sent Jesus, the image of the intangible God, for the salvation of all, because God loves all: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life. Jesus, God’s Son, incarnate, is God’s gift, freely given – he is the very grace of God, an embodied invitation to Nicodemus to be born again. It is an invitation Paul will extend to the recalcitrant Corinthian community: Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace. The Corinthians do not yet know union because they can’t get beyond their own worldly divisions. Paul’s wish for them is essentially Trinitarian: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Such a multi-dimensional experience of the Lord’s presence would indeed allow them to rejoice!
The three Persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – are bound in love to one another, indeed, so perfectly in love that they are one. We may not be able to get our minds around this concept very easily, but if we are one in Jesus, we are one in God and one in the Spirit and they are one in us. Yet this relationship is not static; there is a dynamism to the Trinity that invites us to grow in knowledge of the Lord who has given us life, welcoming the transformation such knowledge entails, that we might have an ever better experience of how God is active in our lives, everywhere, always, involved in everything. Then we too can rejoice and pray, as in the canticle of the Book of Daniel, Glory and praise to our God who is exalted above all forever!
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
So many generations after, we also are asked to give witness. We are reassured that God will be by our side, God will defend us, God will protect us. We’re to understand that, not to mean that we won’t actually meet our end – death will come – but that God will protect us, eternally. God will never lose us, as we give witness to his love in the world.
It’s hard to imagine that, by loving, you would in fact run into conflict, but it has happened in every generation. Love is a power that people find hard to comprehend, because they don’t have power over it. Human beings like the kind of power they control, but love cannot be controlled.
That is wherein we find its truth. Love is given without cost. Love is given freely. And by God, love is given fully. It is in that love that [the saints] proclaimed that love. It is in that love that we continue that ministry of proclaiming the good news. [Their] deaths are a sign to us, a promise of the life that love provides, the life that does not end, because love does not end.
--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, August 29, 2025
Image source 1: Eglise Notre-Dame de Pentecôte, La Défense, Paris, https://www.flickr.com/photos/51366740@N07/15311253760
Image source 2: https://answeredfaith.com/summary-acts-chapter-2/
[F]rom a spiritual point of view, [the disciples’] fear makes no sense. In John’s Gospel, Jesus had, towards the beginning of his ministry, told them about his death and resurrection (2:19). More recently, they had just seen him raise Lazarus from the dead (not to mention all the other “signs” they witnessed during his public ministry). Moreover, Mary Magdalene, whom they knew well, had told them a few hours before that Jesus had risen from the dead.
What keeps them locked behind closed doors is what keeps us locked behind closed doors: not simply fear, but the belief that God could never bring anything good out of a bad situation. It’s a form of despair. Thomas Merton wrote that despair is “the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that God is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves.”
That’s a pretty harsh judgment on those who fall into despair, but it basically means that despair is refusing to believe that God can do more than we can imagine. Ultimately, it’s a form of pride because it says, “I know better than God. And what I know is that God cannot change this.”
What enables the disciples to be fearless, to not despair, is a direct encounter with the Risen Christ.
--Fr. James Martin
Image source: https://friarmusings.com/2018/04/12/opening-hearts-witnesses/
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