Reflection
The Gospel message has never been more urgent than it is today. We are invited to stand up, open our eyes, and get the splinters out of them. We are asked to clean out our hearts which have stored so much debris from the past and wake up. Lent is a time for living on the edge, poised for the next moment of life. We are invited to get out of our comfortable centers of security and live on the brink of the incomplete, the not-knowing, the open future, and to find comfort in the chaotic flow of life. This Lent we are called into a new consciousness of love. Where there is God, there is hope and future, but the Gospel message is clear: hope is what dawns when new wine is put into new wineskins. The old must die for the new to be born. So let us be attentive and be ready for the birth of the new in our midst.
Ilia Delio
Prayer
May I see with open eyes.
Action
Do you experience the gospel message as a matter of the head but not the whole person? Are you willing to let go of old symbols that no longer meet the needs of new times? Do you see the gospel as a daily way of life or as merely as a nice belief system? What would a new consciousness mean for you?
Suggested Reading
Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
Isaiah 43:18-19
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved.
Luke 5:37-39
The one who loves does not remain rigid. Yes, they stand firm, but not rigid; they do not remain rigid in their own positions, but allow themselves to be moved and touched.
Pope Francis
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
Richard Rohr
Inescapably, we are challenged to encounter and befriend the Holy One, not in a heaven hereafter, but in the evolutionary revelatory power of the sacredness in which we are immersed each day.
Diarnuid O’Murchu
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.
Joseph Campbell
In us humans evolution has now become conscious of itself. We have the freedom to choose or reject opportunities to carry the evolutionary adventure into a new future.
John Haught
Our task at this critical moment is to awaken the energies needed to create the new world and to evoke a universal communion of all parts of life.
Thomas Berry.
Taken as a whole, the changing phenomenon of the world’s religions displays the character of an enormous quest, an ongoing search for what is ultimate and whole.
Elizabeth Johnson
We believe we create the future as we move with the Spirit.
Sisters of St. Joseph Vision Statement