Thursday, November 3,
2016
For those of you who get these reflections by email: You may have
missed a reflection for a day or two because I had lost the REFLECTIONS
distribution list on my computer. Finally, with the help of our technology
department, and prayers to St. Anthony, I was able to recover it.
I was frustrated and sad when I
had lost my list because there was no was that I could reconstruct it. I tried
to do everything I could, searching through my computer files carefully, and I
was reminded of that today when I read in our Gospel passage for the day (Wed.
of the 31st week in Ordinary Time—Luke 15:1-10) about the woman who
swept her whole house in order to find a lost coin, and how happy she was when
she finally found it.
Perhaps you have had the same
experience: losing something and then searching carefully for it, perhaps
enduring a time of panic and anxiety (especially when we lose our cell phones
these days) until at long last the lost object is found.
We move from anxiety to great
joy in our little experiences of losing and then finding, and I am wondering
today whether the joy and relief we taste when at last we find what we have
lost might give us a little taste of what Jesus calls the “rejoicing among the
angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Has heaven rejoiced over you and
me in that way? And once we are “found,” is it not true that continue to stray
and to get lost all over again in little ways as well in big ways?
Perhaps I am too prideful, but I
like to think that when God looks upon me in the monastery and sees that I am
at peace and happy, that He too rejoices, because it is His eternal aim to see
all of us as peace and happy one day, and if we are not in that state at the
moment, if we are going through those dark times and sad turns in our lives, we
do well to remember that “this too shall pass,” and like the lost sheep who
becomes paralyzed from fear, we who are paralyzed because of anything
whatsoever will be put upon his shoulders and carried back home and we will
eventually be at peace, and heaven, too, will rejoice.
And in this Year of Mercy, I’d
like to suggest that one of the things that motivates mercy is God’s unending
quest to see us in a state of joy.
God bless you.
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