Bright Wings

For to love God is to trust him, and to be trustworthy in return I relation for our service for him. To distrust and fear to follow his way is implicitly to deny God’s love and to doubt his unfailing faithfulness. When we trust God, we commit ourselves to him in all things, in body, in mind, heart and soul, in thought and deed. We give all to his purpose, seeking only this: to live in harmony with his Holy Spirit, resisting in no way his will as it concerns us. We thus acknowledge that he knows best, that he is God the Holy One, the absolute good and omnipresent Source of all that lives and all that is. We seek not to sin, because to will to do evil is to resist God who is good, and to resist God who is good is to show distrust of his love for us, rather than to cooperate with the saving grace of his love. When we trust God, we are kind to others, because God who is love gives life freely to all, and to be unkind to others is to contradict his good intent with an ill intent, and thereby distrust God’s manifest purpose in the sacramental guidance of his omniscient love … When we trust God, our eyes open to see and perceive Then our minds clear, like the crystal stars you can see when you’ve left the electric lit city behind Our hearts flush clean, like the taste of unpolluted pools of clear mountain water flowing over rocks Then no matter how darkened or uneven the path before us, Our lives light up with the enlightenment of his presence within … The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, which culminates in his death on the cross and achieves our redemption from in, gives meaning tour mortal suffering, and affirms God’s gift to us of human dignity … If I were to choose an analogy to, in some measure, connote this deep salvific mystery of divine love and saving grace, I would compare Christ’s self-sacrifice for our salvation to a person who jumps into turbulent waters and gives his life to save a child from drowning in the grip of a powerful current, for without our Savior’s saving gift of his own life on the cross, humanity is drowning in a deep sea of malice and greed, caught in the undertow of the will to power over others, and we have foolishly swum away from the shore of our soul’s safety, which is our relationship with the goodness of God who loves us … Yet Jesus jumped into these dark waters of human miseries and he chose to drown in our sins to save us from ourselves rising anew from the death we deserve to ascend to his Father in the certain promise of our rising with him to be who and what we were meant to be in his creation … And God said, “Let there be light” Jesus Christ brings us his light for our lives as well Throughout the ages Jesus Christ remains the true light in the darkness of a world haunted by sin, sickness corruption and war, a world where malice and cruelty mar and scar our lives and darken much of the shining beauty of God’s creation of light Yet we have the Risen Lord who is our light and our salvation And through his presence in our lives, we find a refuge of warmth and light … We too may have eyes that see far more than the light of day So that like Bartimaeus, we may walk in the light of the lord And hope to someday open the eyes of our souls in the imperishable light of paradise Let us with each breath of our lives say softly in our hearts, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me … And his single motivation to join his errant creature with him in the wonder of Jesus Christ was his love, is his love for those he made in his image, that we may enjoy fellowship with him forever, who died for each one of us, not just for some of us. For in his eternal eyes he deemed not one of us expendable. In the sight of his divine love not a single one of us is throw away. And this is the reason why in his love for each one of us, he became one with all of us in his humanity while sharing the richness of his divinity to help the poverty of our sin and mortal condition. To reach out his open hand to take our hand as an offering of our salvation, not to force any one of us to accept the gift of his unselfish love, yet offering that gift in his agape grace to all, that we might respond in love and take the offer of his hand in ours, or turn away if we choose, to misuse the freedom of our will, empowered either to accept or reject his eternal love, given the grace needed to embrace his embrace in return for his love forever This is the greatest gift: to be able to say yes to God without compulsion As St. Augustine said, Show me a lover—he will understand! To watch the sufferings of your brother, your sister, without compassion is to deny the love of God and to depart from Christ the King in the final judgment of all things For we cannot love Jesus and disdain those he died for We cannot own God’s love and keep it for ourselves alone … We affirm in this Solemnity that Mary is the Mother of God because we believe that Word became human and lived among us, born from the Blessed Virgin Mary into a fallen world to save us from ourselves. In this way created time, enveloped by uncreated eternity, became the temporal womb of eternity, as the infinite Lord of the universe spent nine months in Mary’s womb, and entered the fraught human condition through her willing agency, that our life may be sacramentally hallowed through Christ’s solidarity with us, inherent on his authentic human nature, … The Shalom Aleichem of the Risen One becomes inextricable expressive of the imperishable relationship of God and his people in the body of Christ, living a sacramental life of faith, hope, and charity in a mindful life of good purpose which endures the attrition of time, and faces the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune attendant on a fallen world, and keeps the faith to the last breath with a gentle yet inexorable strength which flows from his unending love like an inextinguishable underground stream, unseen and unknown to those who seek only the surface of life, yet which perpetually nourishes the ever-rich foliage of the greening earth above the stream Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord, greets his people in every generation and in any and every language: Peace be with You … As we the many are one Body in Christ Each one a member of the others We know that only the mountains and the sky last forever, and that we are all of us mortal beings, yet we remember those we have lost with an undying love, and in our remembrance, those we cherish never entirely leave us, for they remain present in our hearts, part of who we are To honor the memory of those we have lost in this pandemic, then, Let us seek to live in such a way to honor both their memory and that part of them which remains present in us … God is the circle of our soul’s flight on wings of immortal desire God is the circle ever uncircumscribed, before and beyond, above and below, yet here in al that we can know, gazing forever into the face of the Virgin’s Risen child, his deity revealed to us through the image our Maker made of himself in us now glorified to fulfill the limitless spirals of creation and salvation