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MEDITATION:

Written by Richard M. Gula, a contemporary Sulpician priest, lecturer, and author. This is an excerpt from his book “To Walk Together Again.”

When we begin to confine God to specifically religious areas of life, we are forced to turn away from the ordinary experiences of life in order to be touched by the gracious reality of God. Yet this is not the way it was for Jesus. The fundamental message of Jesus about God is that human life is the home of God. Do not look anywhere else. All the parables of Jesus are stories about experiencing God. These stories are filled with very human characters and very human experiences. Yet none of them ever mention “God” directly. What the theologians seem to be saying today, and what so many people searching for God force us to admit, is that if it makes sense to speak of God at all, then we must be able to experience God in the center of our lives where we spend most of our time and expend most of our energy. To realize that God is there in the center of our lives at the deepest dimension of every human moment means that God is never far from us. To experience God in the depths is to be aware that we are related to a larger mystery within which we live…Our relationship to God and response to God cannot be relegated to special activities or special moments. Our relationship and response to God are going on all the time, whether we want them to or not.

PRAYER:

Written by Josemaria Escriva (1902-1975), a Roman Catholic priest who founded Opus Dei, an organization of laypeople and priests dedicated to the teaching that everyone is called to holiness by God.

My Lord and my God: into your hands I abandon the past and the present and the future, what is small and what is great, what amounts to a little and what amounts to a lot, things temporal and things eternal. Amen.