If I knew for certain that I should die next week, I would still be able to sit at my desk all
week and study with perfect equanimity, for I know now that life and death make a meaningful whole.
- Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
- a related poem from Kabir
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten— this is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing
now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire. |
1 Kgs 18:41-46; Ps. 65:10-13; Mt 5:20-26
R. It is right to praise you in Zion, O God.
You have visited the land and watered it;
greatly have you enriched it.
God's
watercourses are filled;
you have prepared the grain.
Thus have you prepared the land:
drenching its furrows, breaking up its clods,
Softening it with showers,
blessing its yield.
You have crowned the year with your bounty,
and your paths overflow with a rich harvest;
The untilled meadows overflow
with it,
and rejoicing clothes the hills.
Reflection on the Scriptures |
“Go first and be reconciled … and then come and offer your gift.”
How seriously do I take this verse of scripture? The Eucharist is, after all, a feast of love, and the love to which we are called is not an abstract, theoretical I-wish-you-well-now-go-away kind of love, but one that desires real peace for
my neighbor, whether the neighbor is on the other side of the pew, the street or the world. We may find it difficult or embarrassing, but there it is. We are called to be holy even as God is holy, and that certainly extends to those apparently insignificant, petty, day-to-day differences that can so easily escalate into major battles, or over time solidify into old hatreds as hard and cold as rock.
“Lord, let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”
- from
preacherexchange.org
Revelations of Divine Love - by Julian of Norwich
Eighth Revelation, Chapter 20
“For every man’s sin that shall be saved He suffered, and every man’s sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed for Kinship and Love”
AND thus I saw our Lord Jesus languoring long time. For the oneing with the Godhead gave strength to the manhood for love to suffer more than all men might suffer: I mean not only more pain than all men might suffer, but also that He suffered more pain than all men of salvation
that ever were from the first beginning unto the last day might tell or fully think, having regard to the worthiness of the highest worshipful King and the shameful, despised, painful death. For He that is highest and worthiest was most fully made-nought and most utterly despised.
For the highest point that may be seen in the Passion is to think and know what He is that suffered. And in this [Shewing] He
brought in part to mind the height and nobleness of the glorious Godhead, and therewith the preciousness and the tenderness of the blessed Body, which be together united; and also the lothness that is in our Kind to suffer pain. For as much as He was most tender and pure, right so He was most strong and mighty to suffer.
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