Saturday, May 21, 2016

Join With Me That We May Be One



By Beth DeCristofaro

Brothers and sisters: Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith … the love of God has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us
. (Romans 5: 1, 5)

Jesus said to his disciples: "I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. … Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you."   (John 16:12, 15)

Piety
Glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; to God who is, who was, and who is to come. (Gospel Acclamation for the Mass of the Day.)
Study
Throughout his ministry, Jesus takes time out to be in prayer with God, to call upon God, to witness before the crowds to God, to publicly thank God.  When he performs signs and wonders or when he is tired he brings himself before God and in this unity is divinity revealed to the awed crowds.  Oneness with God and oneness in the Spirit is what the disciples witnessed.  Jesus’ is not a solitary journey as we see when he gathers his friends around him and he intends that ours not be either. The divine animating flow will be visible in the church he established.

Richard Rohr states that “We could say, ‘In the beginning was the relationship’ or the original blueprint for everything else that exists. John’s word for that was Logos (John 1:1). In other words, the first blueprint for reality was relationality. It is all of one piece.  … Thus, we must read the whole Bible as a school of relationship. The word trinity, by the way, is never found in the Bible. In time, it became our way to explain how God gradually came to be seen as a communion of persons, a perfect giving and a perfect receiving, an inter-face, a mutual indwelling, or as Charles Williams beautifully called it, ‘co-inherence.’ The Bible is slowly making humanity capable of living inside of such lovely co-inherence.” [i]

Action

Jesus modeled the relationship of his oneness with God by healing, feeding, consoling, teaching people.  He did not retire into the inner sanctum of the temple, he met people where they lived and invited them into oneness with the Father then gifted all with the Spirit.  How do I meet others and manifest the presence of this divine relationship?  Pray for the Women now on Cursillo weekend that they, too, are experiencing the relationship of a close, personal and relational God.


[i] https://cac.org/a-school-of-relationship-2016-03-03/

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