Our Need to Wake Up to our Dependence upon Jesus!

 In today's Gospel, Mark 4: 35-41, Jesus invites the disciples to go with him to the other side of the sea. As they are  making their way across the sea, a "violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was...filling up" with water. Terrified, they say to Jesus, who had fallen asleep on a cushion: "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"  They are not perishing, of course, but, in Jesus' eyes overreacting and revealing a lack of faith. Jesus wakes up at their bidding and says to the stormy sea: "Quiet! Be still!" Immediately the storm ceases. And then Jesus asks the disciples: "Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?"

Jesus is speaking to  you and to me, as well!  How often do our reactions to life's storm indicate a lack of faith in Jesus! How often are we not terrified and believe that we, too,  are perishing!  "Look, Lord," we seem to be saying to Jesus!  "We seem to be sinking in the depths of sin, immorality, injustice, hatred, lustfulness, greediness and unfaithfulness in serving you and in our service of others. We seem to be succumbing to idolatrous ways. We are 'out at sea' in waters that seem to be too turbulent for us to manage. Lord! Wake up and save us!"  And Jesus awakes, so to speak, and quiets the storms within our hearts, minds and spirits!

Fear gives way to awe, as we search for and find God in the Scriptures and at work in our lives in steady and powerful ways: at work in the lives of our partners/spouses, our children and grandchildren, our parents and teachers, our community members, our priests and deacons, our employers and coworkers, our president and vice president, our governors and leaders throughout the world!  As we seek the Lord and pray to the Lord, we discover the promises Jesus made to us when He said:

• "Know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time" (Matthew 28:20).
• "I am sending down to you what the Father has promised. Stay in the city then, until you are clothed with the power from on high" (Luke 24:49).
• ""...[I]t is for your own good that I am going because unless I go, the Advocate will  not come to you; but if I do go, I will send him to you" (John 16:7).
• "When the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth" (John 16:13).
• "I shall see you again, and your hearts will be filled with joy, and that joy no one shall take from you" (John 16 22).

So, on this journey to our eternal home, let us keep our focus on Jesus and know that He is  not asleep but awake, especially when "violent squalls" come upon us! It is those storms that wake us up, not Jesus. He is always awake, waiting for us to depend upon Him.

God's Love for Us Is Eternal; the Bond Cannot be Broken!

"...[G]reat in  [our] midst is the Holy One of Israel," the God who calls us daily out of the place of slavery, the God who teaches us to walk in His ways, the God who carries us in His arms; who draws us to himself "with bands of love"; who fosters us "like one who raise[s] an infant to his cheeks. Yet, though God stoop[s] to feed [us, we do not] know that [God is our] leader."  That lament from Hosea 11: 1, 3-4, 8c-9, is as true about us today as it was for the Israelites to whom Hosea was speaking.  God is a God of love, a God who watches over us as a shepherd guards his sheep!  A God who gave  His life as the Son of Man, who, on the cross, drew all of us to Himself and redeemed us from Satan's forces of evil--the evil spirits--that roam the earth looking for someone to destroy! Jealous of our inheritance of heaven, a gift of being ransomed by Jesus, Satan is tireless in his efforts to keep us our of heaven. He will succeed as, in a baptism, Jesus took  us as His own. His Sacred Heart was pierced on the cross and blood and water poured  forth, filling our baptismal fonts and our chalices with the blood of the New Covenant. We belong to God forever!

God's Transforming Us in the Stillness

 In today's first reading, 2 Cor 3: 15-4:1, 3-6, Paul reminds us that "all [who gaze] with unveiled face[s] on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit."  In Psalm 46, God says to us "Be still and know that I am God." In the stillness, as we gaze upon God in the Scriptures, in nature, in the core of our being, in the heart of our loved ones--spouses, children, babies--God is at work transforming us into other Christs!  

Paul tells us that the "Gospel is veiled...for those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, so that they may not see the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God."  There is the belief that more and more people do not believe in God, that more and more people have walked away from the Eucharist and that more and more of our churches are empty when religious services are being held, though our priests and our ministers, as Paul reminds us, "do not preach [about themselves] but Jesus Christ as Lord, and [themselves] as slaves for the sake of Jesus. For God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in [their] hearts to bring to light the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Jesus Christ."

Are you, am I, present at religious services? Do you, do I, take being still in the presence of our God, a God who lives within all of creation, who dwells in the core of our hearts, who is present in the Eucharist in every tabernacle in our Catholic Churches. Do you, do I, seek the "light [that] shine[s] out of darkness, [that shines] in our hearts to bring the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Jesus Christ" to our attention and thus to the attention of our children, our spouses and anyone we encounter?  Or are you, am I, "blinded" by the "god[s] of this age," money, material things, pleasure, sex, and other substitutes that we seek to fill the emptiness that only God can fill?