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 has stored so much debris from the past and wake up. Something new is breaking into our teeter-tottering world-at-war, and those who see the new will live anew. The message of Jesus is a revolution of the heart but also an evolution of life. The God-centered person acts from a new center of intensified being, a radical center of love that is unencumbered, free, daring, adventurous, boundary-crossing, hybrid and future-oriented. Christian life is meant to be creative, novel and future-oriented, but the packaging of this life into rigid dogmatic formulas has all but killed the spirit of terrestrial life, keeping God unrelated and unaffected by the world’s sufferings. Religion has become a matter of the head and not of the total person. It is time to get our lives in order, to live creatively and freely in the radicality of love, to live with a consciousness of readiness. Something new is breaking into our world; it is the power of God rising up from what is dead and lifeless into a new more incredible life that we cannot imagine. 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? 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
n 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