The question, you see, is not to prepare (for something
specific) but to live in a state of ongoing preparedness so that, when someone who is drowning in the world comes into your world, you are ready to reach out and help . . . to let them be part of your life in God — that’s ministering.
- Henri J. M. Nouwen
(Be ready . . . for whatever . . . God is with you.)
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ACTS 15:22-31; PS 57:8-9, 10 AND 12
JN 15:12-17
Jesus said to his disciples:
"This is my commandment:
love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one's life for one's friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the
Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another."
Reflection on the
Scriptures |
At this end of the Easter Season we begin to focus more closely on the work of the Spirit. We begin asking God, the creator, to send the Spirit through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, into our lives and conform us to the shape and intention of the Body of the Risen Christ. This conformation will mean that “we” appreciate the implications of the first-person plural. It
will mean that like Paul and Barnabas, Silas and Judas, we will be sent to go and bear fruit that will last. We will be mandated by Christ the head, and by His Body the Church to bring others to life who are dead in their own hopelessness and sin.
What it means to us in our daily life is that we look at every other Christian as a dear brother or sister, to be loved and cared for. It
further means that we suffer our human sufferings for the sake of the work of Christ, not with complaint and anger, but with patience and gentle compassion. It also means that our lives are marked by an astonishing joy – even amid suffering and loss. Pope Francis has frequently reminded the Church that the sign of God’s reign, “on earth as it is in heaven” is spiritual consolation – a phrase that St. Ignatius also identified as the mark of the Christian life. Even in the worst
moments of any day or week or lifetime, the presence of God brings charity, joy, peace, patience, humor, kindness, and a host of other wonderful gifts.
The invitation of the end of the Easter Season that we are moving toward is this: ‘WE together” are conformed, by God’s Spirit, into Christ’s Body the Church and we will live in joy NOW and forever. I want this for myself, I want this for
my world; God grant me the grace to labor for it with my present, and my last, breath of life.
- by Eileen
Burke-Sullivan Revelations of Divine
Love - by Julian of Norwich
Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 38
In Heaven “the token of sin is
turned to worship.”—
Examples thereof:
ALSO God shewed that sin shall be no shame to man, but worship. For right as to every sin is answering a pain by truth, right so for every sin, to the same soul is given a bliss by love: right as diverse sins are punished with diverse pains according as they be
grievous, right so shall they be rewarded with diverse joys in Heaven according as they have been painful and sorrowful to the soul in earth. For the soul that shall come to Heaven is precious to God, and the place so worshipful that the goodness of God suffereth never that soul to sin that shall come there without that the which sin shall be rewarded; and it is made known without end, and blissfully restored by overpassing worship.
For in this Sight mine understanding was lifted up into Heaven, and then God brought merrily to my mind David, and others in the Old Law without number; and in the New Law He brought to my mind first Mary Magdalene, Peter and Paul, and those of Inde; and Saint John of Beverley; and others also without number: how they are known in the Church in earth with their sins, and it is to them no shame, but all is turned for them to
worship. And therefore our courteous Lord sheweth [it thus] for them here in part like as it is there in fulness: for there the token of sin is turned to worship.
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