UNLEASHING THE MIRACULOUS WITHIN US

GOD ALREADY MADE THE MIRACLE

“Jesus said to the people, ‘I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute. You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed. By your perseverance you will secure your lives.’”  Luke 21: 15-19

With the variety of opinions contrary to the Gospel that are being presented to us in current news items and our conversations with family and friends, it is easier to be silent than to speak on behalf of Christ’s Gospel and the supportive Church teachings. This week’s Gospel (Luke 21:5-19) encourages us to take to heart Christ’s message and to expose ourselves to what is really happening to us and around us, and to see it from a perspective that “gives us a wisdom in speaking.”  As a wise bishop harassed by the press once said, “When we promised to follow Jesus, as we each did at our Baptism, he never said that it always would be easy.”

Sometimes it is not easy to speak from a position that is contrary to what our friends, family members and co-workers hold. It may not be easy, but for the good of all, God became one of us, and, while he walked among us, he didn’t spend his time establishing an institution; rather, he personally met and trained ordinary men and women, like you and me, to spend our lives doing what he did, showing people that it is only God’s love that is credible and genuine, that our gratitude for God’s love – really gratitude for this God who is Love – is the only thing that can bring us joy. Each of us disciples promised at our baptism to profess our faith. How open have we been to studying Jesus, to letting him “give us a wisdom in speaking”?

EXAMPLES OF HOW TO LIVE YOUR FAITH IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Recently I helped two families prepare funeral liturgies for their parents who were awesome parishioners who  led long lives – 90+ years – grounded in Jesus-like Faith:  faith in God, faith in their family members and faith in the goodness and dignity of all people and all of God’s creation. And their lifetimes were lived in a world that had as much bad news as we have. The similarities between our news and Bible-time news is described in today’s readings and in Fr. Tim’s bulletin column:

. . . “the day is coming, blazing like an oven” (Malachi 3:19); “the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone” (Luke 21:6); “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom”(Luke 21:10); “there will be powerful earthquakes, famines and plagues…and awesome sights and mighty signs will come from the sky”(Luke(21:11). When our daily headlines seem drawn from such predictions, it is easy to slip into a kind of hysterical uncertainty about “What’s next!?!”

   Fr. Tim emphasized St. Paul’s advice to us via his Letter to the Thessalonians:

Consistently maintaining that integrity in our lives is what St. Paul addresses in writing to the Thessalonians. He sounds a bit disappointed by reports of a kind of ‘disorderliness’ in the relationships among these relatively new Christians, who are “not keeping busy but minding the business of others”(2 Thessalonians 3:7,11).

Focus on one’s own following of the Gospel, not on the weakness or faults of others, is what Paul encourages—and it continues to be good advice for all who seek to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. In a society and culture that offer much to be frustrated by, much to be disillusioned about, much to be annoyed with, we need Paul’s reminder to rise above discord and pettiness, and to look beyond, to the fulfillment of God’s design for all things—not a project of our accomplishment, but a realization of God’s power and glory.

It is, I think, this “fulfillment of God’s design for all things,” and “realization of God’s power and glory” that were the main ingredients in the lives of these two recently deceased parishioners, and this made them  genuinely Mary-like women of Faith. How did it happen – this letting Jesus “give them wisdom”?

I wonder if it came as a result of the early days of their first and subsequent pregnancies, when they pondered the wisdom of God in creating new life within them. Was it from what they came to know in the silence and aloneness of the then expectant mother’s life, through pondering what was happening within them – how the new life was progressing from so much more than just the interactions between them and their husbands – that God was the one engineering this miraculous process? God’s handiwork was creating and nurturing this new life and they were the silent handmaids as God’s processing took place within them for nine months, commingled themselves with this child whose new life was forming. It changed them. How could pondering this do otherwise? How imitative of Jesus “giving his disciples wisdom”! They, too, were being formed anew.

UNLEASHING THE MIRACULOUS WITHIN US

Let us come to Mass this weekend and live the coming week, not hoping for a miracle to make the world align better to God’s wishes for us, but pondering and recognizing that God already made the miracle by making us and our world! It is we who, through our praying, studying, pondering and speaking the truth, are helping the world align with God’s plan for all of us!

Sister Loretta