Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Today’s reading

Philippians 2:1-4

“If there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being of full accord and one mind” (Phil. 2:1-2).


Prayer

Tell me Jesus, what was it like for you when you broke the loaves and fed the crowds? What was it like when you reached out your right hand and healed the leper kneeling in the dust before you? What went through you when you blessed the broken and saw divine life and hope fill the expectant hearts and hungry eyes of those who came to you? Was your joy complete? Did it fill you so that you could not imagine doing or desiring anything else?

I have known that ecstatic surge of joy and truth. Surely you must have too. But I can’t imagine what it was for you who, simultaneously, dwelt in intimacy, total union, with the unspeakable longing of the Blessed Mystery and the incessant hungers of human hearts. This was the place of your joy.

Can our joy ever be so complete? Can we live in exquisite unity with you and each other so that we are of one heart, one mind, given not to our Napoleonic selves but to immeasurable compassion of God, which is to say, to you?

Everything I touch seems infected with me, stained with self-seeking, calculated to assuage my anxieties. I grow sick of it. I hunger to lose myself in you, in the self-giving you are, in the reign of peace you bring, consumed by the mind you would make in me and in all.

Surely, I can neither know nor want the pain this might bring, but that Spirit you give cannot stop wanting you, drawing me to lose heart and mind, body and all their powers, in the love you are. That alone is joy complete, final freedom and fulfillment. It is to this that your Spirit draws me. Don’t stop, Jesus. I resist. But don’t stop. Amen.

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