The Kingdom of Heaven is Near

"My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God," we pray in today's responsorial psalm, Psalm 63.   God's reply: I thirst for you more than you thirst for me. God is not putting us down.   Already on the cross, before you and I were born, Jesus, the Son of God, cried out in His torturous death: "I thirst!"  That thirst was for the salvation of each of us. In today's Gospel, Mt. 25: 1-13, Jesus asks us to be prepared for His coming, to be thirsting for Him, to be believers in Him, to be filled with love!  "The Kingdom of heaven," Jesus tells us, "will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones, when taking their lamps, brought no oil with them, but the wise brought flasks of oil with their lamps" (the oil of love, wisdom, faith, mercy, generosity, patience, hope, kindness and any other virtue modeled by Jesus and Mary in the Scriptures). Will you and I be prepared, or, like the foolish virgins, will our lamps be empty?