Sunday Gospel Reflection, July 3, 2022: The seventy-two returned rejoicing...

The seventy-two returned rejoicing…

We are called to be God’s joyful partners!

    The prophet Isaiah calls upon the people of Israel who have returned from exile to be joyful: Rejoice with Jerusalem, he says, and be glad because of her! Isaiah portrays the city of Jerusalem as a nursing mother partnering with God to provide God’s dependent people with nurturing care in abundance: Oh, that you may suck fully of the milk of her comfort, and thus know the prosperity God promises, a prosperity to be measured not in wealth but in the depth of relationship with the Lord. As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you, God adds. Isaiah communicates an invitation to intimacy with God, a God who is generous and nurturing and caring, whose capacity to care for us is infinite. Psalm 66 reminds the people that God has cared for them in the past – he has changed the sea into dry land – and calls upon them to participate in the intimate relationship to which they are invited through exultant prayer: Let all the earth cry out to God with joy! As for the psalmist, he does not hesitate to share his own good news: hear now, all you who fear God, while I declare what he has done for me. 

    When, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus appoints seventy-two men to go forth and spread the good news of salvation, those disciples must be as dependent as a child: carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals, Jesus says. Upon completion of their mission, they will return rejoicing, acknowledging all that God was able to accomplish through them because of Jesus’ name. To be a disciple, one who understand’s Christ’s mission, one who lives in intimate relationship with him, one who allows God to work in and through him, is true reason for rejoicing. Paul will know similar joy in his work on behalf of the gospel. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, he writes to the Galatians. Paul sets aside any dependence on the material world, recognizing that his true dependence must be on Christ alone, Christ, the source of peace and mercy for all, Christ, whom Paul has come to know intimately through his complete and utter embrace of the new creation that is life in Christ. God works through Paul as God works through the disciples and as God works through us. May we joyfully embrace our role as intimate partners of the Lord, bringing the good news of salvation to his kingdom on earth. 

This post is based on OLMC’s Scripture class. 

Image source: www.wordclouds.com

A struggle to follow the Lord better (Loyola Institute for Spirituality)

    We get in touch with our deepest self, the space where God speaks to us, through discernment. Discernment is not only necessary when serious problems need to be solved, it is an instrument of struggle to follow the Lord better day by day and hour by hour. 

--Loyola Institute for Spirituality 

Image source: Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance (1664), https://review.catechetics.com/inspired-through-art-art-discernment-catechetical-ministry Quotation source

Let the dead bury their dead (St. John Chrysostom)

     It is far better to preach the kingdom of God, and rescue others from death, than to bury one who is dead and can be of no use, especially when there are other persons to discharge the office. 

--St. John Chrysostom        

Image source: https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/why-did-jesus-say-let-the-dead-bury-their-dead.html
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If we let Christ into our lives (Pope Benedict XVI)

    If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. 

--Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, April 2005 

Image source: Entry, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, Mill Valley, https://www.facebook.com/mountcarmelmv 

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The radicality of Jesus' call (Bishop Robert Barron)

   The life of a disciple is a matter of obeying commandments. Listening to commands is tied closely to love on the part of the one who commands, and since love is nothing but the willing of the good of the other, the obedience that Jesus speaks of is a surrender to the one who massively wants what is best for the surrenderer. 

    I am urging you all to see the radicality of Jesus’ call to discipleship, which cuts through so many of the social conventions of his time and ours. I am urging you to see that everyone—rich and poor, men and women, those on the inside and those on the outs—are summoned to discipleship, and that this summons is the most important consideration of all. It is the one thing necessary. 

--Bishop Robert Barron, Gospel Reflection, July 21, 2020 

Image source: James Tissot, The Call of Peter and Andrew (1886-1894), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_of_the_disciples#/media/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_The_Calling_of_Saint_Peter_and_Saint_Andrew_(Vocation_de_Saint_Pierre_et_Saint_Andr%C3%A9)_-_James_Tissot_-_overall.jpg

New paths (Dana L. Robert)

   When followers of Jesus walk beside him, he leads them in directions they would rather not go, into neighborhoods they would rather avoid, and to meet friends of his they might not normally know. 

--Dana L. Robert      

Image source: https://gracielynn.blog/tag/path/ 

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When it comes down to the wire (Elizabeth Turnwald)

    We spend so much time as Christians telling ourselves (and too often others) how we surrender to the will of God, how Jesus is all we need, how we place all of our trust in Him. But when it comes down to the wire, do we? In the Gospel this week, Jesus calls the disciples to put their money where their mouths are. Various disciples approach him saying, I will follow you wherever you go, Lord. And Jesus answers them, Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head. Is this a warning to us? Is He lamenting how impractical and idealistic his followers are? Is He somewhat patronizingly remarking, Aw, that’s cute. They think it’s as easy as speaking their loyalty into existence – as though by stating, I will be faithful implies a lifetime without questioning, doubt, or fear. 

--Elizabeth Turnwald

Image source: https://ferrelljenkins.blog/2009/03/06/the-cost-of-discipleship-foxes-have-holes/ 

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Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 26, 2022: I will follow you wherever you go...

I will follow you wherever you go…

What must we do to follow the Lord?

    When, in the First Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah is told by God that he must anoint Elisha as prophet to succeed him, Elijah sets out immediately and, finding Elisha in a field, throws his cloak over him, investing Elisha with power and authority, as God had requested. In recognition of his kinship responsibilities, Elisha states, please, let me kiss my father and mother goodbye, and I will follow you. Burning his own plowing equipment to cook a meal of his oxen, Elisha knows he has experienced God’s call and there’s no turning back now. You are my inheritance, O Lord, Psalm 16 proclaims. Elisha recognizes God’s call and gives up everything to embrace the future God offers. 

    As Jesus begins his journey to Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel, he is not alone: his disciples walk alongside him. When one claims, I will follow you wherever you go, Jesus’ responds: Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head. On this final journey, Jesus has no shelter, no place of comfort or security, and his followers should not expect the journey to be comfortable, either. Discipleship is not about a place but a way of being, a means to finding one’s home in the good news of Jesus Christ. As such, discipleship must come from the heart. 

    Then, in a gesture reminiscent of Elijah, Jesus invites one of his entourage, Follow me, but this time, when the man asks, Lord, let me go first and bury my father, Jesus’ response seems odd: Let the dead bury their dead. If you’re going to be a disciple, in other words, you have to be all in: it’s time to proclaim the kingdom, here and now, and that kingdom is very much alive. We can’t look to what is left behind, at what we might be losing; if we are to follow Jesus, we must look forward to what will be, and be defined by his cross. 

    As Paul tells the Galatians, For freedom Christ set us free. Through his death and rising, Jesus freed us from Mosaic law, that we might follow him and his law of love. For the whole law is fulfilled in one statement, Paul continues: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. To be a follower of Christ is to know the depth of his love for us and to be changed by it; we must thus live by the Spirit, serving one another through love. Once we recognize this, there’s no turning back – we have to be all in! 

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

God invented eating (C.S. Lewis)

   And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being ‘in Christ’ or of Christ being ‘in them’, this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts-—that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution—a biological or superbiological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely’ spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. 

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity       

Image source: John Reilly, The Feeding of the Five Thousand (1958), Image Copyright © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes, https://www.methodist.org.uk/our-faith/life-and-faith/the-methodist-modern-art-collection/index-of-works/the-feeding-of-the-five-thousand-john-reilly/

Eating of the living bread (Veronica Szczygiel)

   What I’ve realized most from my bread-baking adventures is that we as Catholics are so fortunate and blessed to partake in eating of the living bread every time we go to Mass. The Eucharist is unleavened bread that, in each and every Mass, becomes Jesus’ body. How loved we are by our Father to have access to him in living form in the Mass! It was only through a pandemic year away from the Eucharist that I realized how essential receiving the body and blood is to my faith and spiritual well-being. The fact that every Catholic Church around the world holds the consecrated living bread within its tabernacle is an astonishing and incredible witness to our interconnected faith. Our church is universal; it knows no boundaries. It’s no surprise that Jesus chose bread, then, for this miracle of transubstantiation. Jesus knew — just like I now know — that bread unites. Bread is what brings everybody together to the same table. And his living bread is the best and most fulfilling bread of all, infinitely better than anything I can ever bake, for the bread of Jesus prepares us for eternal life in him. 

--Veronica Szczygiel 

Image source: Tabernacle, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, Mill Valley, https://www.facebook.com/mountcarmelmv 

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How do we participate in the Body of Christ? (Susan Haarman)

    Eucharist [reminds] us again to be in relationship. It's Christ over and over again reminding us I am the living bread.

    But it goes beyond just remembering. Relationships are about more than just what we receive. I think the words from the first letters the Corinthians is a great reminder that the Eucharist isn't a spectator sport. We participate in the body of Christ when we break the bread. We participate in the blood of Christ when we drink from the cup. Living into a Eucharistic reality means participating in it. It means saying yes to that relationship again and again and again. It means trying to model the Eucharistic relationship that God offers us to everyone around us - the folks that we love, the folks that we are troubled by, the folks that we know, and the folks that we don't. 

    That the Eucharistic calls us to be in relationship is a challenge over and over again for us as believers and perhaps more importantly to us as a Church. At this time when we find ourselves so distant on this Bread of Life Sunday, how do we think about what it means to participate? To love those who seem unlovable. To go beyond the boundaries of our own understanding of who fits and who doesn't. 

--Susan Haarman 

Image source: The ostensibly unlovable Ebenezer Scrooge, still, A Christmas Carol (2009), 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1067106/mediaviewer/rm3392178432/ 

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St. Joseph, Patron Saint of Fathers (Tom McGrath)

    St. Joseph seems to have been a man of few words but plenty of action. The brief stories that mention him in the Gospels leave us with a vivid impression of a strong, supportive man who revealed his feelings and beliefs more in what he did than what he said. This this humble carpenter always seems to stand a short distance from center stage. As a foster father he fostered many great traits in his son, Jesus. 

    Here are four wisdom principles found in the story of St. Joseph, the patron saint of fathers, workers and of the universal church: 

Every difficult family situation is best met with compassion. “Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly” (Mt 1:19). 

Expect God to speak to you. And be willing to listen. “Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her’” (Mt 1:20). 

Practice your religion; it will help you discover who you are and why you are here. “According to the law of Moses they took him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord” (Lk 1:22), and “Each year his parents went to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover” (Lk 2:41). 

We are all here to do some work. “I must be in my Father’s house” (Mt 2:49). 

(To read Tom McGrath’s complete article, click here.) 

--Tom McGrath 

Today we ask You to bless our earthly fathers

for the many times they have reflected the love, strength, generosity, wisdom, and mercy 

that You exemplify in Your relationship 

with us, Your children. 

(Excerpted from a prayer by Tony Rossi) 

Happy Father’s Day to all fathers, 

 biological, adoptive, and spiritual, 

with a shout out to our pastor and spiritual father, 

 Fr. Patrick Michaels! 

Image source: Raj Bond as Joseph, The Chosen, https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9471404/mediaviewer/rm4195054848

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The secret of my day (St. Pope John Paul II)

   The Eucharist is the secret of my day. It gives strength and meaning to all my activities of service to the Church and to the world. 

--St. Pope John Paul II 

Image source: https://epicpew.com/what-60-of-catholics-dont-know-about-the-eucharist-but-need-to-learn/ 

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Food that immortalizes (Bishop Robert Barron)

   Many of the Church Fathers characterized the Eucharist as food that immortalizes those who consume it. They understood that if Christ is really present in the Eucharistic elements, the one who eats and drinks the Lord’s Body and Blood becomes configured to Christ in a far more than metaphorical way. The Eucharist, they concluded, Christifies and hence eternalizes.

    If the Eucharist were no more than a symbol, this kind of language would be so much nonsense. But if the doctrine of the Real Presence is true, then this literal eternalization of the recipient of Communion must be maintained. 

    But what does this transformation practically entail? It implies that the whole of one’s life—body, psyche, emotions, spirit—becomes ordered to the eternal dimension. The Christified person knows that his life is not finally about him but about God; the Eucharistized person understands that her treasure is to be found above and not below. Wealth, pleasure, power, honor, success, titles, degrees, even friendships and family connections are all relativized as the high adventure of life with God opens up. 

--Bishop Robert Barron, Gospel Reflection, May 4, 2022 

Image source: https://catholicphilly.com/2018/01/catholic-spirituality/in-the-eucharist-we-become-what-we-receive/

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 19, 2022: This is my body that is for you...

This is my body that is for you…

What is your experience of Eucharist?

    What happens when we come together for Eucharist? In his Letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives the first known account of the Last Supper, during which Jesus took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me, then repeated this with a cup of wine. To offer bread and wine is a common practice in Jewish celebration: in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus includes bread in his feeding of the five thousand, while in the Book of Genesis, Melchizedek, king of Salem, a priest of God Most High, makes the standard offering of bread and wine to Abram on the occasion of Abram’s great military victory. Melchizedek’s is the paradigm of the new priesthood that Jesus will come to establish. But there is a crucial difference: unlike Melchizedek, Jesus offers himself, the perfect offering, for our sins, once and for all. Jesus is a priest forever, in the line of Melchizedek, echoing Psalm 110, but Jesus’s is the ultimate sacrifice. But if Jesus’s is indeed the final and only sacrifice necessary, why do we come together to experience the sacrifice of the Mass?

    In fact, at the Last Supper, Jesus takes elements common to the Passover feast – the bread and the cup – and invests them with new meaning. Jesus is about to offer himself as a sacrifice for all: This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Our repetition of this moment is our ongoing participation in his death and rising; the sacrifice of the Mass is timeless -- it stands outside of time. This is the key point: every time we come together to celebrate Eucharist, we are participating in his death and rising, forever, giving witness to the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and thus proclaiming the death of the Lord. It is this participation in Jesus Christ’s death and rising, and our concomitant proclamation, that we celebrate on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. 

    The abundance of God’s grace as seen in the feeding of the five thousand is a foreshadowing of the abundance of Eucharist and its power in our lives. At the sacrifice of the Mass, the essence of the bread and wine changes, becoming Christ’s essence; when we take Communion, we take Christ into our body, and Christ’s essence becomes a part of us. This is a stunning truth of our faith, an experience unlike any other, in any faith tradition. Do this in remembrance of me, Jesus told his disciples. When we open ourselves to his presence, to his essence, we are one with him – we are the Body of Christ. And that is what Eucharist is all about. 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class. 

Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Thrice loved (Vinny Flynn)

   What does divinely loved mean? It means you are thrice loved. There is no separation in the Trinity. At every moment of your life, you are being held in the loving embrace of three divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

--Vinny Flynn 

Image source: https://reflectionsofgodslove.com/2019/06/16/trinitarian-relationship/
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God's otherness (Fr. Ron Rolheiser)

   When religion is rejected in the name of science, invariably the religion that is being rejected does not safeguard God’s otherness and has, however unintentionally, reduced God to something that can be grasped through human categories. Stripped of genuine divinity and mystery, such a God will inevitably not stand the test of hard human questioning. 

--Fr. Ron Rolheiser, O.M.I. 

Image source: Pythagorus, Chartres Cathedral, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_the_Catholic_Church#/media/File:Pythagore-chartres.jpg 
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The implications of an infinite God (Tim J. Myers)

   Innovations in spiritual art are often new manifestations of the transcendent. 

   Spiritual thinking is at the heart of what I create. I have found, for example, that even when doodling during a meeting, I am continually pulled—almost unconsciously—to the figure of a rayed sun beaming itself out intensely in every direction. If that is not a spiritual image, I don’t know what is. 

   One theological principle particularly compels me. The traditional attributes of God include his being infinite. The implications of an infinite God is that he is both personal and impersonal, static and kinetic, male and female, immutable and ever-changing—and fundamentally mysterious. Who are we to say otherwise, to restrict the nature of a transcendent being? 

    Doesn’t everyone sense, consciously or otherwise, some warm, radiant, benthic, infinite center to all things? I think of Kong Qiu, better known as Confucius: At the summit of being, all see and know the principle of the One.  If I can in some small way evoke this center with a force of freshness and mystery, one that neither spells itself out or demands specific theological reactions—then I’m satisfied. Of course my image is utterly insufficient. But if it leads to an unease, a sudden shifting out of balance, if the viewer simply glimpses some dark, incandescent essence, then he or she may be set on the spiritual path, or moved further along it. I consider that a sacred result. 

--Tim J. Myers, creator of Center (image above) 

Image source & complete article available at: https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2021/10/01/modernism-art-tradition-painting-240998?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14229&pnespid=reduBzVaZPIWhuXAuGu.DpGTpkynBMN3LbWkmvB08hpmG4eDqMQnhfe3IlV5q2LUpwRj7cbc

God cannot be limited by any human concept (Henri Nouwen)

   God cannot be understood: he cannot be grasped by the human mind. The truth escapes our human capacities. The only way to come close to it is by a constant emphasis on the limitations of our human capacities to have or hold the truth. We can neither explain God nor his presence in history. As soon as we identify God with any specific event or situation, we play God and distort the truth. We only can be faithful in our affirmation that God has not deserted us but calls us in the middle of all the unexplainable absurdities of life. It is very important to be deeply aware of this. There is a great and subtle temptation to suggest to myself or to others where God is working or where not, when he is present and when not; but nobody, no Christian, no priest, no monk, has any special knowledge about God. God cannot be limited by any human concept or prediction. He is greater than our mind and heart and perfectly free to reveal himself where and when he wants. 

--Henri Nouwen  

Image source: Sergei Guz, Ezekiel’s Vision (2020), https://medium.com/interfaith-now/the-emergence-of-the-ineffable-god-in-world-religions-4ac9f1d24e42 
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Who sees God? (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

   Earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush aflame with God. Those who can see take off their shoes, the rest of us sit around and pluck blackberries and daub our natural faces unaware. 

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Image source: Domenico Fetti, Moses Before the Burning Bush (1614), https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2013/03/03/this-is-holy-ground/
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We are forever understanding the Trinity (Lynn Cooper)

    In his book The Divine Dance, Richard Rohr adds texture to the relationship between journey and mystery. He says, that it is not that the mystery is something we cannot understand, it’s that we are forever understanding it. My friends, this Trinity Sunday, I invite you to dwell in this reframing of mystery – the forever understanding –and marinate in one or two of these provocations: 

    How might unity in multiplicity inspire us to be in solidarity with people of other faiths or no faith? 

   In the spirit of the liturgical year, which calls us to re-encounter our tradition and story in cycles, how have joy and sorrow from your past year redefined your relationship to the Trinity? 

   How might we use the Trinity as a way to deepen our work for justice, honoring difference and diversity as holy? 

   And lastly, how might we make space to listen to and carouse with the Spirit, allowing everyday sacramental moments to break open our faith so we may remember, once again—in body and spirit—that God is a verb?

--Lynn Cooper 

Image source: https://jodythomae.com/tag/holy-spirit/
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Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 12, 2022: I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now...

I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now…

Is it worth it to try to comprehend the Trinity? 

   Time and space define our reality. But human notions of time and space only come into existence as God creates our world, and when God does so, Wisdom is beside him as his craftsman, participating in the creative process. The Book of Proverbs tries to capture this moment of creation, when God made firm the skies above and set for the sea its limit. It’s hard for even the most vivid imagination to picture! God’s act of creation separates the elements and creates order from chaos, and throughout it all, God takes delight in Wisdom, who plays before him all the while, just as Wisdom finds delight in the human race. The very act of creation is also an invitation: God invites humankind to enter into intimate relationship with Wisdom so that we can enter into the depth of God’s love. But we must have faith to believe in what we cannot see or delimit or prove; God can’t be locked into a neat little box. The beauty of contemplation is that it allows us to suspend our definitions and enter more fully into the truth of God that we have yet to comprehend. And in so doing, we come to know God better every day. But to do so, we must participate in a dynamic effort of comprehension, for the Trinity itself is dynamic, ever mutating before the eyes of our mind. 

    Yes, God is beyond comprehension, and that’s ok – we come to know God better every day, although not all at once. Jesus says as much in John’s Gospel: I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when the Spirit of truth comes, Jesus adds, he will guide you to all truth. As long as we are open, God will continue to increase our capacity to understand. We are justified by faith, as Paul tells the Romans; we believe in what God has revealed whether we fully comprehend it or not, because we have gained access by faith to grace. We stand in the presence of God, with God present within us, by faith, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. This is the gift Jesus came to reveal. 

    God is beyond description; the confusion we feel when we contemplate the Trinity is utterly normal. We may not be able to bear full comprehension of the Trinity now, but we have simply to participate actively in the growth of faith to make progress. For if our heart is open to the love of God, confusion is insignificant. We must just allow the Spirit to increase our understanding and to expand our awe, one wow after another: O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8) 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class. 

Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Make strong in our hearts what unites us (David Steindl-Rast)

You, the one

From whom on different paths

All of us have come.

To whom on different paths

All of us are going.

Make strong in our hearts what unites us;

Build bridges across all that divides us;

United, make us rejoice in our diversity.

And at one in our witness to your peace,

A rainbow to your glory. 

--David Steindl-Rast, OSB         

Image source: Lake Neusiedl, Austria, https://www.theactivetimes.com/travel/travel-these-hotspots-see-most-beautiful-rainbows-planet/slide-2
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To live with the Spirit of God (Sr. Miriam of the Holy Spirit)

   To live with the Spirit of God is to be a listener. It is to keep the vigil of mystery, earthless and still. One leans to catch the stirring of the Spirit, strange as the wind’s will. The soul that walks where the wind of the Spirit blows turns like a wandering weather-vane toward love. It may lament like Job or Jeremiah, echo the wounded hart, the mateless dove. It may rejoice in spaciousness of meadow that emulates the freedom of the sky. Always it walks in waylessness, unknowing; it has cast down forever from its hand the compass of the whither and the why. 

   To live with the Spirit of God is to be a lover. It is becoming love, and like to Him toward Whom we strain with metaphors of creatures: fire-sweep and water-rush and the wind’s whim. The soul is all activity, all silence; and though it surges Godward to its goal, it holds, as moving earth holds sleeping noonday, the peace that is the listening of the soul. 

--Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D. 

Image source: https://www.westcoastweathervanes.com/weathervanes/double-heart-weathervane/ 

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Are we open to God's surprises? (Pope Francis)

   Let us ask ourselves today: are we open to God’s surprises? Or are we closed and fearful before the newness of the Holy Spirit? 

    Do we have the courage to strike out along the new paths which God’s newness sets before us, or do we resist, barricaded in transient structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new? 

--Pope Francis, Pentecost 2013 

Image source: https://beasone.org/tag/holy-spirit/ 
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Breathe on me, breath of God (Brother Isaiah)

Breathe on me, breath of God:

fill me with life anew,

that I may love as you have loved

and do as you would do.

Come breathe on me

Come breathe on me

Breathe on me, breath of God,

keep breathing till my heart is pure,

until with you I have one will

to live and to endure. 

Come breathe on me, breath of God

Whisper words of life, Lord

Whisper words of life, Lord

Over me

Breathe on me, breath of God; 

my soul with grace refined, 

until every earthly part of me 

glows with your fire divine. 

Come breathe on me, breath of God 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Breathe on me 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

over the waters, God 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

over the fearful soul 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

over my stony heart 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

over the whole wide world 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

Whisper words of life, Lord 

over the troubled soul 

Hallelu, over my stony heart, Lord 

and I shall live… 

To hear Brother Isaiah (soon to be Fr. Isaiah!) sing Breathe on Me, Breath of God, click on the video below: 

Image source: https://journeytopenuel.com/2013/05/15/pentecost-breath-of-god/ 

Video source

God in us (Robert Baer)

 

Bethlehem was God with us,

Calvary was God for us,

and Pentecost is God in us. 

--Robert Baer 

Image source: El Greco, The Pentecost (ca. 1600), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pentecost%C3%A9s_(El_Greco,_1597).jpg Quotation source

Access to the holy heart of God (Bishop Robert Barron)

   Jesus says that the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in Christ’s name, will teach his disciples everything. The Holy Spirit is the love shared by the Father and the Son. We have access to this holy heart of God only because the Father sent the Son into the world, into our dysfunction, even to the limits of godforsakenness—and thereby gathered all of the world into the dynamism of the divine life. 

    Those who live in Christ are not outside of God as petitioners or supplicants; rather, they are in God as friends, sharers in the Spirit. And this spiritual life is what gives us knowledge of God—a knowledge, if you will, from within. 

    When the great masters of the Christian way speak of knowing God, they do not use the term in its distanced, analytical sense; they use it in the biblical sense, implying knowledge by way of personal intimacy. This is why St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for one, insists that initiates in the spiritual life know God not simply through books and lectures but through experience, the way one friend knows another. That knowledge is what the Holy Spirit facilitates. 

 --Bishop Robert Barron, Gospel Reflection, May 22, 2022 

Image source: Pentecost (artist unknown), https://globalworship.tumblr.com/post/88141644745/pictures-prayers-of-pentecost

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 6, 2022: The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness...

The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness…

How do we come to unity in community?

    Human beings often live in a state of constant discontent, sometimes heightened by pain and suffering. Frequently, that discontent is of our own making. Witness the actions of the people migrating in the east in the Book of Genesis, who decide to stop in Shinar and build a tower there. God recognizes their self-centeredness and arrogance and scatters them from there all over the earth. Creation has forgotten that God and only God is the source of all, that God is responsible for all that is. Recognizing the manifold works of God, Psalm 104 asks the Lord to send out his spirit, and renew the face of the earth. Even after Jesus’ death and rising, the Romans still experienced discontent: all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now, Paul writes to them. But the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness, Paul reassures them, interceding for the holy ones according to God’s will. Moreover, as Jesus had promised at the Jewish feast of Tabernacles in John's Gospel, Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me. We thirst for the fullness of God; if we believe in Jesus, we will find what we seek and that source of life that is the Spirit will flow from us into other people’s lives. The promise of the Spirit is that unity that will heal the disunity of Babel in Shinar; what God reveals in Jesus transcends all human limitations, eliminating division and allowing all to become conduits of the Spirit. 

    The confusion of Babel gives way to the unity of understanding when, in the Acts of the Apostles, the time for Pentecost was fulfilled. In Jerusalem on that day, each one hears the disciples speaking in his own language. Their proclamation of the good news is meant by all and understood by all, to bring them all together in belief in Jesus as the Messiah. Something extraordinary is happening, something that defies their ability to explain. Psalm 104 notes that when you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. In Jerusalem that day, all can say Jesus is Lord thanks to the Holy Spirit active in their midst. The Spirit may work in each of us differently, Paul tells the Corinthians, but it is all for the sake of the whole; the purpose of the Spirit is to draw us together into one body. When the disciples receive the Spirit directly from Jesus on the evening of that first day of the week, in John's Gospel, they are not yet ready; the doors are locked and will still be locked a week later. We know that the Spirit is in us as well; we know that Jesus believes we have it in us to be his disciples. We may need to grow into it, to grow away from our fundamental discontent, but we have what we need because we receive his Spirit in baptism, and we are thus a new creation. And then? We must live Christ, giving witness to the mercy of God, remaining fully present in him and allowing him to be fully present is us. Our job now is to love the world and to let love do what it is meant to do, serving our larger community through our unity, thanks to the Spirit, in the Body of Christ.

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

The paradox of expectation (Henri Nouwen)

   Whereas patience is the mother of expectation, it is expectation itself that brings new joy to our lives. Jesus not only made us look at our pains, but also beyond them. You are sad now, but I shall see you again and your hearts will be full of joy. A man or woman without hope in the future cannot live creatively in the present. The paradox of expectation indeed is that those who believe in tomorrow can better live today, that those who expect joy to come out of sadness can discover the beginnings of a new life in the center of the old, that those who look forward to the returning Lord can discover him already in their midst. 

--Henri Nouwen 

Image source: https://www.stwilfridskirkby.org/2020/05/24/sermon-the-ascension-of-jesus-acts-1-6-14/ 

Quotation source