The Stained Glass Buffalo: invitation. rsvp?

01 February 2010

invitation. rsvp?

Jesus, as a prophet in today’s gospel, challenges His own people to a new way of living, a new way of seeing things. Ironically, they yearn for a new and better existence while rejecting the very means to reach the wholeness, freedom, and peace they desire. How stubbornly they resist Jesus’ prophetic invitation to accept a wider vision of the loving, inclusive reign of God.

Everyone committed to others in Christ, whether parent, teacher, friend, or employer, will at times be called and challenged by God to prophetically confront suffering and division, to help lead the world toward peace and new life. Paul reveals that the key to doing this is love itself. Without love, whatever we do or say will never ring true or move hearts. It is love that enables us to be truly compassionate, understanding, patient, forgiving, accepting of others. Love sustains our courage with the power to endure and carries us confidently through every challenge. The source of that love is God the Father who raised Jesus from death to new life.

-Rev. Michael Traher, SFM, Living with Christ

No comments:

Post a Comment

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.