Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves … Don’t search for the answers, which could not be
given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(What are you questions at this time in life? How can you love and respect them? What growth do they invite?) |
1 THES 4:1-8; PS 97:1 AND 2B, 5-6, 10, 11-12
MT 25:1-13
Jesus told his disciples this parable:
"The Kingdom
of heaven will be like ten virgins
who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.
Five of them were foolish and five were wise.
The foolish ones, when taking their lamps,
brought no oil with them,
but the wise brought flasks of oil with their lamps.
Since the bridegroom was long delayed,
they all became drowsy and fell asleep.
At midnight, there was a cry,
'Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!'
Then all those virgins got
up and trimmed their lamps.
The foolish ones said to the wise,
'Give us some of your oil,
for our lamps are going out.'
But the wise ones replied,
'No, for there may not be enough for us and you.
Go instead to the merchants and buy some for yourselves.'
While they went off to buy it,
the bridegroom came
and those who were ready went into the wedding feast with him.
Then the door was locked.
Afterwards the other virgins came and
said,
'Lord, Lord, open the door for us!'
But he said in reply,
'Amen, I say to you, I do not know you.'
Therefore, stay awake,
for you know neither the day nor the hour."
Reflection on the
Scriptures |
Today’s parable is a warning against adopting such attitude in our
relationship with God. A conveniently designed or imagined pseudo-God could be programmed. We “know” when and where to meet that God: Sunday mass, visit to the tabernacle... We also know that we have to prepare ourselves, if or when serious illness occurs. But in between it is “our time”.
The parable reminds us that all of our life is God’s time, that a true God (as opposed to an imagined pseudo-God)
is a God of surprises that remains un-programmable and that consequently the only adequate readiness is a wholehearted desire for a life-commitment to God. The emphasis here is on wholehearted, because there exists also a half-hearted type of commitment that may satisfy us and the pre-conceived demands of our designed pseudo-God, but a commitment that is basically as empty as the oil lamps of those careless young ladies and is merely a “going through the motions” without any
content.
Yet the emphasis has to be also on desire, because, as long as we are human, the implementation of our desires is always going to be less than flawless. It is our heart’s desire for commitment that comes from God and that counts before God.
- by Luis
Rodriguez, S.J. Revelations of Divine
Love - by Julian of Norwich
Fourteenth Revelation, Chapter 41
I am the Ground of thy
beseeching. And also to prayer belongeth thanking. Thanking is a true inward knowing, with great reverence and lovely dread turning ourselves with all our mights unto the working that our good Lord stirreth us to, enjoying and thanking inwardly. And sometimes, for plenteousness it breaketh out with
voice, and saith: Good Lord, I thank Thee! Blessed mayst Thou be! And sometime when the heart is dry and feeleth not, or else by temptation of our enemy,—then it is driven by reason and by grace to cry upon our Lord with voice, rehearing His blessed Passion and His great Goodness; and the virtue of our Lord’s word turneth into the soul and quickeneth the heart and entereth it by His grace into true working, and maketh it pray right blissfully. And truly to enjoy our Lord, it is a full
blissful thanking in His sight. |
|
|
