The Stained Glass Buffalo: Here is here. Now!

01 February 2010

Here is here. Now!

What an amazing moment it must have been that day in the synagogue when Jesus announced, “Today,this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Imagine the stunned looks on people’s faces, their mouths hanging open in disbelief. Many were expecting the messiah to be a mighty king, a fierce leader who would restore the kingdom of Israel. But the boy next door? The one they remember playing with as children?

And yet, who better to proclaim the good news of God’s reign than someone who is intimately familiar with the daily lives of God’s people? The message that Jesus came to proclaim is just that - that God is near at hand, not far away and indifferent to our needs, but in our very midst, healing us, freeing us and loving us.

You and I are a part of God’s people. Through who we are and what we do, we need to show that God is present and at work in the world, even in all of its brokenness. Through our caring and compassion, our listening and loving, we too proclaim the reality of God’s reign. As we celebrate this Eucharist, may we take to heart the challenging words of Teresa of Avila, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands, no feet but yours.”

- Teresa Whalen Lux, Living with Christ

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It is Jesus

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
--Pope John Paul II

Carlo Carretto:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.