The joy of conversion, Christian community, and the Catholic faith
Jesus paid all the bill by His death and resurrection. At infant baptism, our parents received them for us then. Sometimes in our adult life, we must make our own commitment to know and follow Jesus in His new kingdom. Each sacrament in God’s kingdom offers us a different set of operating gifts for personal growth and adult ministry for others.
With the crisis in the world today, what might be our role as evangelists to help spread Jesus’ messages of love, peace, joy and stability? Like St. Benedict’s monasteries, our homes can be secure places of faith, peace, study, work and harmony for ourselves with God’s power flowing out into the culture around us.
I sense joining the church Jesus founded is like joining a country club. Jesus gives us a free paid-up membership card, which He paid for by His death and resurrection. As we use the sacramental gifts, our lives radiate the fruits I listed from Galatians 5:22: love, joy, peace, patient endurance, kindness, generosity, faith, mildness and chastity or self-control, according to our life’s mission. These are a result of living a higher spiritual life more connected to God. The Holy Spirit “melts us, molds us, fills us and uses us” to help others.
St. John shows us the major works of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus told the disciples about at the Last Supper. The Holy Spirit teaches us God’s truths about life. He reminds us of what Jesus did and said. He witnesses to what comes from God or from the devils. And the Holy Spirit guides us through our lives so we can help God make the world a better place to live in and ultimately at the end of our life get to heaven.
What does Jesus continue to do all over the world each day? He changes a little bread and wine, as our daily best food. It is full of God-power to equip us to go forth into the world bringing the love of Jesus to others. What about all of those people all over the world who are caring for coronavirus victims? Aren’t they all reaching out with the hands of Jesus to heal and comfort? Receive and go forth to help heal the suffering.
We have been created to find our fulfillment and peace only in knowing, loving and serving God. It is an unmistakable fact of experience that human beings will be restless and searching until they have surrendered their lives totally to God. We have been created with a God-shaped hole, or vacuum, in our hearts, which can only be filled by Him who created us. It simply won’t work to find true happiness and fulfillment in anything or anyone else. St. Augustine expressed it this way: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You,” O God.
As we really pray this Sequence, not just read it, something amazing begins to increase in us. Jesus’ Light grows in intensity in us. We enter more deeply into the fountain of “living water,” Jesus promised to the women at the well in St. John 4:10: Jesus replied to the women and to us: “If you recognized God’s gift, and who it is that is asking you for a drink, you would have asked Him instead, and He would have given you Living Water….the water I give shall become a fountain within the person leaping up to provide eternal life,” John 4:14. See also Ezekiel 47, Isaiah 55:1ff and Psalm 1. Aren’t these wonderful promises and blessings? Let us praise and thank God for all He has already given us. Scripture says, “Ask and you will receive; seek and you shall find.”