Hard...To....Believe....To....Accept?

"What is God's will for me? " or "I wish I knew what God's will for me is.” How often we have heard those questions asked? Have we not asked those questions ourselves? The answer comes to us, through Him, Who is the living, personification of our God's will. A Presence, that is hidden and revealed within the same humanity you and I share. We have just completed the liturgical season that celebrates that mysterious reality. A reality that cannot be confined to time and space. Whenever we want to confine God, Mystery, to metrics, we are comfortable with, then we have created for ourselves, a false God, an idol. Idols are not life-givers, rather they sap us of our vitality, and leave us life-less and shriveled up. The more time we spend worshiping at their altars, the more we lose connection with the life-giving God, Jesus, the Prophet, came to reveal to us. As we grow in relationship with the revelation of The Living God, Who is Jesus The Christ, the more we will become aware of who we are, and Who we have been called to be as well as what we have been called to do. By our Baptism, we are confirmed in time that which has been our destiny since before the beginning of time. When we look at who we are, we must always keep before us, the eternal element. The Eternal Presence is our Beginning Point, our source of origin. We are not then to be confined by the language of time and space. We are beyond all of that. Since we are created in the image and likeness of God, and God cannot be fully understood by our finite mind, so we will never understand the mystery of who we are. We are however, again by our Baptism, being drawn into the Great Mystery. As a consequence, we are drawn ever deeper into the mystery of who we are. It is a journey into an answer. An answer that will never be complete, or satisfactory. We will have to wait for our return to our Origin when "we will know as we ourselves are known". In the meantime, we have to use our God given gift of common sense to flesh out what God's will is for us. We must constantly remind ourselves that In Baptism we were consecrated, set aside, to be the "contemporary Christ". Who is this Christ we are asked to be the living presence of? For what purpose did He come? What is the mission, the ministry that has been entrusted to us for continuation? This is how Jesus describes His, and now, our, God given mission: "The Spirit of The Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free." While He walked among us in the flesh that was His Mission. His mission must now take flesh within us. As He was, so we are called to be, today. The following are the famous words penned by St.Theresa of Avila: “Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes with which He looks with compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which He walks to do good, yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world, yours are the hands, yours are the feet, you are the eyes, you are His body. Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth on earth but yours, yours are the eyes with which He looks with compassion on this world. Christ has no body now on earth but yours." WOW isn’t that something else? Is it not really difficult to get our little, finite minds around the mystery of God's will for us. It is a mystery that seems to be revealed, slowly, as we live a life that is sometimes mistakenly called an ordinary. How far from ordinary each life is. What mystery is hidden and revealed in each and every person, event and action. As we develop a reverence for the Christ dwelling within ourselves, we will become more ready to embrace the many disguises Christ now appears in. As we encounter and, through grace, embrace the living Christ in our own evolving poverty, we will become more ready to embrace His Presence in our many and varied encounters with poverty. What great transformation needs to take place in every level of church, and state so that the poor, the needy, the homeless, the alienated, may be comforted and consoled with the living, loving, enfleshed presence of the Risen Christ. In this Year of Faith each of us must accept the responsibility of throwing away all that is now acceptable, familiar, and secure. Let us dare to embrace the uncertainty of a real faith journey, knowing that when are embracing our deepest truth we will never have to journey, in fear, into the darkest of valleys. The presence of The Shepherding Christ will reach us, but in the way we expect that presence to appear. There is the covenant love, the unbreakable, personally committed commitment of Our Lover who will not, nor cannot lose sight of us. As it is with He/She and us, so it is for us to live lives that reflect that lived reality. "Life is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery to be lived." We, then, are mysteries being drawn into a living spiritual unity.