Open wide your door to the one who comes. Open your soul, throw open the depths of your heart to see the riches of simplicity, the treasures of peace, the sweetness of grace. Open your heart and run to meet the Sun of eternal light that illuminates all men.
--St. Ambrose of Milan
Image source: https://inspiration.org/spiritual-life/an-open-heart-for-god
Quotation source
Hospitality was a fundamental value in ancient times. In the Second Book of Kings, when the prophet Elisha (successor to Elijah) arrives in Shunem, a woman of influence offers him food and shelter because he is a holy man, honoring Elisha because he is a vehicle of God’s word. The unnamed woman makes a place in her home where God’s word, in the guise of the prophet, can stay. And when God’s word is allowed to live and dwell in our midst, when we are hospitable to that word, then there is peace and prosperity. Moreover, God’s fidelity to God’s people is unwavering, as Psalm 89 reminds us: through all generations my mouth shall proclaim your faithfulness. It is no surprise, then, that God is welcome in their midst, or that the psalmist will sing the goodness of the Lord, forever.
Jesus will adapt the ancient laws of hospitality to his own teaching. In Matthew's Gospel, he sends his disciples out into the world to proclaim the good news, he assures them, saying, Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me. When we make room for the Word of God in our lives, when we invite God’s love in, when we heed Christ’s call to inclusivity, we love God, and in so doing, we draw others into our love for God. When Jesus speaks of those who love father or mother more than me, he is reminding the disciples that the greater their love for God, the more room there is for everyone else. Our love for God makes room for our love for everyone.
Love is not a finite parcel we dole out, but rather an infinite channeling of the inexhaustible source of love flowing through us, one we must allow to keep expanding so that it can be ever more inclusive. For, as Paul writes to the Romans, we must think of ourselves as dead to sin, dead to our own self-focus, our own self-centeredness, our own egotism, living for God in Christ Jesus. We know connection in our own faith community and beyond only if we let the the Word of God direct us by receiving him into our lives, into our homes, daily, that we might share that love with our world.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
--Khalil Gibran
Image source 1: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jsjgeology/19853641148
Image source 2: https://www.sonomacounty.com/articles/sunset-views-jenner-sea
Poem source
One way to pray in a fear-filled world is to choose love over anxiety, to open the door of the heart to dwell in the intimate presence of the One who loves us. When we begin to understand at a deep, spiritual level that we live surrounded by love and in communion with God no matter what the external circumstances, we can let go of the fear that lurks on the outskirts of our minds. Hardly a day passes in our lives without an experience of inner or outer fears, anxieties, apprehensions, and preoccupations. We do not have to live in fear. Love is stronger than fear: 'There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.' (1 Jn 4:18)
--Henri Nouwen, Spiritual Formation
Image source: Hank Willis Thomas,The Embrace (2023), in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., https://www.wgbh.org/news/embrace
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning…
--T. S. Eliot, excerpt from Little Gidding
Image source: https://www.setonmagazine.com/catholic/spirituality/the-wheel-of-fortune-4-ways-man-deals-with-good-and-bad-luck
The seeker understands brokenness, and, most of all, realizes that it is precisely at the point of personal need that God comes to fill up the emptiness that is us.
--Sr. Joan Chittister,
Monastic Wisdom
Image source: https://www.bible.com/reading-plans/20968-praying-for-god-to-fill-up-my-emptiness/day/5
Blessed is the Father,
Who lets the Lord
be his
guiding hand,
Whose faith brings
his
family courage,
Whose wisdom comes
from God,
And whose
children
still stand and
honor him.
May the Lord bless you on this day and always.
Image source: Guido Reni, St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus (1635), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Joseph#/media/File:Guido_Reni_-_St_Joseph_with_the_Infant_Jesus_-_WGA19304.jpg
Quotation source 1
Quotation source 2
Prayer is not introspection. It is not a scrupulous, inward-looking analysis of our own thoughts and feelings but it is a careful attentiveness to the Presence of Love personified inviting us to an encounter. Prayer is the presentation of our thoughts— reflective thoughts, as well as daydreams, and night dreams—to the One who receives them, sees them in the light of unconditional love, and responds to them with divine compassion. This context of thinking in the Presence, of conversation and dialogue with Love, is the joyful affirmation of our gentle Companion on the journey with God who knows our minds and hearts, our goodness and our beauty, our darkness and our light.
The Psalmist prays the prayer for us (Psalms 139:1–3; 23–24):
O Lord, you search me and you know me,
you know my resting and my rising,
you discern my purpose from afar.
You mark when I walk or lie down,
all my ways lie open to you...
O search me, God, and know my heart.
O test me and know my thoughts.
See that I follow not the wrong path
and lead me in the path of life eternal.
--Henri Nouwen
Image source: John Phillip, RA, Prayer (1859), https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/prayer
Quotation source
We belong to God. Our relationship with the Lord is based in covenant, in our acceptance of God’s promise to be faithful to us, and our (often failed) promise to remain faithful to God. When, in the Book of Exodus, Moses goes up the mountain to God, the Lord reassures him, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people. Moses and his community know that the Lord has drawn them into relationship because of the deep love the Lord has for his creation. In Psalm 100, the people of Israel sing joyfully to the Lord and serve the Lord with gladness because, as the psalmist notes, he made us, his we are. They recognize themselves to be God’s chosen people, beloved from the beginning of time, and come before him with joyful song!
In Jesus’ time, God proves God’s love and compassion for all humanity once and for all by sending his Son Jesus to bring salvation to all. This wondrous act, as Paul tells the Romans, reconciles us to God, so that we will be saved by his life. Jesus’ every act is born of love and compassion for humanity. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ heart is moved with pity for the crowds who come to hear him teach and preach. The crowds are troubled and abandoned, and Jesus knows they need shepherds to guide them, so he sends forth his twelve disciples, giving them the power to heal their world. Their relationship with the Lord enables the disciples to act out of love for all, giving without cost.
Acting in knowledge and full awareness of God's infinite love for all, we too can go forth as Jesus’ twelve disciples did, bringing that love to our broken world in the form of mercy and forgiveness. We do this out of love for that world, without a care for our own needs, for, like the twelve disciples, without cost we have received; without cost we are to give. We belong to God, having been born of God’s love, and we are called to bring that love to all, following the one who gave all for us all.
This post was inspired by Fr. Pat's many amazing Scripture classes.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
God isn't this distant thing that we need to go out and find, but rather, God is invested and incarnated in the midst of our own lives, inviting us continually to feel God's presence and to feel God's love. It's in these sacramental moments, these moments that point back to the ways that we experience grace through the sacrament, that I find myself being fed and being reminded of what the reality of the Eucharist looks like for me.
Eucharist reminding 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 letter to 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.
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, June 14, 2020
Image source: https://www.corpuschristiphx.org/blog.php?month=202106&id=2105864693&cat=&pg=1&title=Corpus+Christi+-+The+Real+Presence+of+Christ+in+the+Eucharist
Quotation source
In the early Church, they had a prayer for the breaking of the bread, the Didache: As this broken bread was once grain, scattered across the mountainside, to be gathered together and made into a single loaf, to be broken to feed the many, so may we be.
The Didache defined why they gathered. It defined the significant moments of that gathering and for them in it. Imagine you are a single grain; what can you do with a single grain? Your value is not in your independence; your value is allowing yourself to be changed so that you can become bread to feed the many.
The breaking of the bread is change – change in us, so that there can be change in our world. We are his instruments gathered in Word and sacrament, broken and changed, to feed the many. When we break bread, we recognize Jesus in our midst, in ourselves, as we receive him. We welcome him to stay, to be with us, to teach us how to be his Body in the world.
--Fr. Patrick Michaels Homily, April 23, 2023
Image source 1: https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/sunday-eucharist-in-the-early-church/attachment/early-church-eucharistic-meal/
Image source 2: https://earlychurchhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Agape-Feast-1.jpg
Every time we go to Eucharist, we are meant to let that transforming event touch us, touch our wounds, our weaknesses, our infidelities, our sin, and our emotional paralysis, and bring us to a transformation in wholeness, energy, joy, and love. The Eucharist is the ultimate healer.
[T]hat is what we can cling to, as war rages on and death continues around us, we can cling to real presence: in bread and the cup, in each other. In our second reading today, Paul reminds us that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.” We proclaim that Christ is present, living and dying in each person affected by war, poverty, racism, and violence. And we lament this. We proclaim our own complicity in this senseless sin. But, as we accept the grace of Christ’s body in our Eucharist, we do not let sin get the final say. What an absurd faith we have – a faith that proclaims the transformation of such simple bread and wine into an expansive mystery of darkness, death, grace, and gift. A faith that God is present in our food – that God is present in us.
And so, in the face of darkness, we can remember these mysteries. We can continue to offer the little bit that we are able to – food for the hungry, clothing for the naked, a listening ear for a friend who is struggling, forgiveness to a neighbor – corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Sometimes all we can offer is presence – the proclamation that we are here. We can sit beside a friend who is suffering, we can continue to offer prayers for those affected by violence, near and far. We can continue to show up, and when this presence might feel meaningless and hopeless, we can remember this story where Jesus took the little bit that we could offer and filled the gap, multiplying it into more than enough. We proclaim that Jesus can transform even death and darkness. We can cling to the hope that Jesus can do so again. This is our faith. How absurd. How beautiful.
--Jenny Weirtel
Image source: Fritz Eichenberg, The Lord’s Supper, https://malmstromramonat.wordpress.com/2016/12/02/encountering-the-holy-trinity-of-artists-beginning-the-research-process/
Quotation source
I am the living bread that came down from heaven, Jesus tells his disciples in John’s Gospel; I am, in other words, that very merciful care you need. Remembering past events into the present moment as he references the manna in the desert, and stating that, whoever eats this bread will live forever, Jesus calls us together in Eucharist and fills us with life, not temporary life, but life eternal. Through our participation in Eucharist, in his death and rising, we are spiritually fed; it is in Eucharist that we find our identity and our union, in the body and blood of Jesus himself. For, as Paul writes to the Corinthians, This cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? This bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? When we share together in Eucharist, we are one in Christ; the Eucharist is our participation in his blood, his death, his resurrection. Community is about unity with; communion is about union with and in. There is no room for division; we, though many, are one body, the Body of Christ, if only we gather to partake of that living bread come down from heaven.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
How do we understand the Trinity? We don’t! God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, beyond language. The Christian belief that God is a Trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God.
The sign of the cross is a Trinitarian formula that identifies us. The death and rising of Jesus are the central event in which we are grounded. When we make the sign of the cross on which Jesus was sacrificed, we are calling a blessing upon ourselves, calling ourselves into union with God.
When the priest makes the sign of the cross over the assembly, he is placing that assembly in the middle of a bond of love that is perfect union.
It is meant to be prayer.
--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Scripture Class, June 2020
Image source: https://www.learnreligions.com/why-catholics-make-sign-of-cross-542747
I want to imagine that the Holy Trinity is the closest thing to a kiss.
The Father would be the purest lips from which that feeling would be born. The Son would be that moment when those divine lips leave their mark on the mortal creature. The Holy Spirit would be the one to instill in the chosen one that feeling born of God when he kisses. But the Three would be a single Kiss in which the soul feels that Someone watches over it (Father), that Someone has taken it into his arms (Son) and that Someone has made it feel loved (Holy Spirit); that is, One God and Trinity.
The Holy Trinity is a mystery that encompasses and gives meaning to all those mysteries we palpate in the middle of our life: death, pain, our destiny,... In Trinitarian immensity, God reveals Himself in pure state and offers mortals the infinite Mercy of a Father, the eternal Commitment of the Son and the immortal Love of the Holy Spirit.
Is it not enough, between lovers, a silence or a look to express everything that encompasses your heart? For this is how a soul feels when God kisses it, that is, when the Father creates it, the Son embraces it and the Spirit comforts it.
The Holy Trinity is that: the three and inseparable ways of love that God has; three ways, but ONE LOVE.
Image source: Unknown Master, Westphalia, Germany, Altarpiece with Mercy Seat (1260-1270), https://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/m/master/zunk_ge/zunk_ge3/0altarpi.html
God is relational. God does not exist in isolation. Here’s the thing: neither do we! We’re made in God’s image and likeness, and so for us, being relational is also essential. When we enter into loving relationships with one another, we share in God’s own nature. That sounds simple, but living it out is much more complex!
--Fr. Danny Gustafson SJ
Image source: Egino Weinert, Trinity Cross (20th c.), https://www.sacredartjewelry.com/Trinity-Cross-by-Egino-Weinert-p/sscr1369.htm
Quote source
--Sharon Zaenglein Chipman
Image source: Salvador Dali, Moses and the Burning Bush, https://bibleartists.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/the-burning-bush/
Quotation source and complete article
It is in the New Testament that our understanding of God as Trinity begins to be expressed more explicitly. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, John’s Gospel reminds us. God was willing to sacrifice his Son for the sake of the salvation of all humankind, that all might have eternal life, a life with purpose beyond the finite. Jesus tries to explain the immensity of this truth to the Pharisee Nicodemus, but God is a paradox – both three persons and one – and only faith can take us beyond logic to a realm that is greater than any we know on earth.
We do know that, in the Trinity, God has revealed God’s self in three persons united by a bond of love so perfect that there is no separation between them. What is truly extraordinary is that God has shared that bond with creation, creating out of love, breathing life into that creation, acting always out of love. Paul reminds the Corinthians to embrace the unity, the community, the relationship to which they have been called, a unity in Christ that comes from God and is supported by the Holy Spirit. God draws each and every one of us into that great love; God wants us to participate in that love every single day: encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, Paul tells the Corinthians. God invites us to move past our own limitations as we embrace the dynamic relationship embodied most perfectly by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. What could be more beautiful (and extraordinary) than that?
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s 2020 Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
