An Infinite Love

From his human heart, the Son of God prays to the Father in these words: "I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” Let us listen with amazement to these words. Jesus is telling us that God loves us as he loves himself. The Father does not love us any less then he loves his only begotten Son. In other words, with an infinite love. God does not love less, because he loves first, from the very beginning! Christ himself bears witness to this when he says to the Father: "You loved me before the foundation of the world.” And so it is: in his mercy, God has always desired to draw all people to himself. It is his life, bestowed upon us in Christ, that makes us one, uniting us with one another.

POPE LEO XIV Homily, June 1, 2025

The Presence of God

In truth God is hidden everywhere, but He reveals Himself only to the heart which is capable of discovering Him and converting itself. For the presence of God is coextensive with the totality of beings. There is nothing His gaze does not penetrate. There is nothing in which His action is not felt. Thus we should strive to rediscover ourselves as being immersed in the life and the light of the Trinity. We should realize—and this is already a form of contemplation—that all things at all times emanate from the Father of light through the Son and through the Spirit; we should therefore dwell in their presence and their radiance.

JEAN DANIELOU God’s Life In Us

Creation Out of Love

The reason for creation lies entirely in the unfathomable mystery of God, who is self-originating and self-communicating love. While the world is the gracious result of divine freedom, God's freedom means necessarily being who and what God is. From this standpoint the world is not created ex nihilo but ex amore, ex condilectio, that is, out of divine love.

CATHERINE MOWRY LACUGNA God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life

Progress

Therefore my advice to you, friends, is to turn aside from troubled and anxious reflection on your own progress, and escape to the easier paths of remembering the good things, which God has done; in this way instead of becoming upset by thinking about yourself, you will find relief by turning your attention to God… Sorrow for sin is, indeed, a necessary thing, but it should not prevail all the time. It is necessary, rather, that happier recollections of God's generosity should counterbalance it, lest the heart should become hardened by too much sadness and so perish through despair.

ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX Sermons on the Song of Songs

Homily — Pentecost

The mystery of Pentecost is sometimes referred to as God’s way of reversing the Tower of Babel story in the Book of Genesis. It is a movement from disunity to unity. The sacred author describes how the people had a common language and were able to cooperate and plan with a common purpose. But what was their plan? To make a name for themselves, to build a tower above everyone else lest they be scattered abroad. But God, in his inestimable wisdom and mercy, would not allow our human race to mount up a tower of pride from which they could look down on others and insulate themselves from others. So, the Lord scattered them over all the earth and made it difficult for them to communicate with one another, the very opposite of Pentecost. 

The inability to communicate leads to all kinds of fear and mistrust. We see this in the world today even among ourselves who speak the same English language. The desire to make a name for ourselves makes communication more like the babel of many tongues. But on this great feast of Pentecost, we have the Holy Spirit creating a bond of unity. People from every corner of the known world could understand the disciples as they proclaimed the mighty acts of God!

I like to connect this scene with Jesus’ last discourse in chapter 17 of John’s gospel which we have been listening to this past week. Jesus prays earnestly to his Father that his disciples may be one. This is his constant refrain: “That they may be one”—not scattered, not trying to build a name for themselves but focusing on the one thing necessary: the mighty acts of God. For what acts are greater than what Our Lord Jesus Christ has done for us. Though he was rich, he became poor for our sakes. He always took the last place. Not only did he give us his body and blood as our spiritual food, but he gave us his very breath that we might live, he in us and we in him.

The Holy Spirit is this breath, the life-giving breath that Jesus breathed out from the cross and likewise on the evening of the first day of the week. On that evening Jesus said to his disciples, “Peace be with you…And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” It is the Holy Spirit that fulfills Jesus’ prayer “that they may be one.” He makes it possible for our community, our families, our Church to be united—not isolated, not fearful. If we try to go it alone and try to make a name for ourselves, the Spirit will mercifully humble us somehow—and don’t underestimate his ability to do so! We have to come down from any towers we have built and allow the Spirit to pour into our hearts the miracle of hope, for “We have all be given to drink of the one Spirit.” Let us drink deeply, then, of this breath of God and unite our voices in prayer, “O Lord, send forth your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth!”

God’s Embrace

If we keep talking to God, we come to experience something utterly unexpected (at least, the first time that it happens): we feel his hand, as it were, gently raising our downcast and tearstained face to look into his face. And what do we discover in his face? Not fury, not disappointment, not rejection. We see compassion for the pain we are suffering, we see appreciation for the efforts that we are making out of the desire to please him, and above all we see loving acceptance—pardon that is more than pardon, pardon that is an embrace.

BERNARD BONOWITZ, OCSO Truly Seeking God

Homily — Visitation

When considering the feast of Our Lady’s Visitation to Elizabeth, we are apt to be a little too hasty in applying its “meaning” to ourselves. We are likely, that is, to generalize and conclude at once that we are all naturally bearers of a mystery we ought to share with others, the mystery of who we are. True enough… But what exactly is the mystery we bear? Simply the mystery of our own existence, of our own goodness and good will? I wonder whether this is enough to save the world… To view things only in this way appears to me as deflating, because such moralism excludes from the Christian experience the sense of radical wonderment. It forgets God’s unaccountable desire, attested everywhere in Scripture, to dwell with us and use us as instruments of salvation. 

We should pay close attention to Elizabeth’s chief sentiment: How does this happen to me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?  These simple words contain the whole range of marveling Christian jubilation, triggered by God’s free initiative and its result in a historical event. The Visitation is Elizabeth’s personal way of experiencing the foundational mystery of the Word’s Incarnation. This question of Elizabeth’s, spoken in amazement and awe, ought to motivate our whole life of faith, too. The mystery of the Visitation is above all the revelation of God’s initiative, of God’s design to come to us through the cooperation of the Immaculate One, in order to make his home with us, accompany us in all our life’s trials, and transform our lives by his active presence. 

Only as a result of God coming to us in Jesus through Mary can we receive the eternal Word of salvation into our lives and allow him to become in us the source and energy of our service of love. Only as graced participants in a mystery greater than ourselves—the primal Mystery of the Incarnation—can we, in turn, become bearers of the same saving mystery for others. We do not share ourselves; we share Christ in us. And let us not forget, either, that baby John leapt for joy in his mother’s womb as a response to his divine cousin’s approach in Mary’s womb! Christian faith is not mainly about affirming conceptual truths or celebrating our own intrinsic human goodness, but above all about rejoicing ecstatically, about dancing for joy in our spirit in grateful reaction to an overwhelming Presence and Event: the coming of God to us in the human flesh of his Son.

Indeed, through a life steeped in prayer and the sacraments we must continually welcome the approach of the Word to us through the mediation of his and our human Mother. Only by so participating in the mystery of salvation as conceived by God’s Wisdom will we be able to live a life of fruitful charity. We do not bear ourselves; our whole bliss ought to be to become for others bearers of the one divine mystery of love with which we have first been graced.