In our Marianist Community we often quote Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche movement. He connects today with the tomorrow of Easter (and every tomorrow) in great fashion:The Spirit will give us tomorrow what He wants us to live tomorrow, but we must not waste time worrying about it. We should live the beauties of the relationship we have with Jesus and His Spirit and with each other in the now. We must become like children living in wonderment and in trust. The Spirit will give us the peace, the strength and the love to live tomorrow when it comes. Now, He gives us the strength to live this moment. That is why we must rejoice at all times, rejoice in what He is giving us now – the joys, the sufferings, the peace, the hopes. This is his gift to us today.
So, how is your today? I hope it has been already blessed!
For us, we miss painfully those who have gone before us.
But we are united with all of you in love and prayer. And whatever pain we feel is nothing in comparison with the pains of the world – of the poor, the ill, of the sufferings of so many nations around the globe. They too are embraced completely in the reality of this Holy Week. For them, too, if this week speaks truth, there is life beyond the mayhem and chaos of both natural and human-made disaster.
That sense that all of us – every one, and all nature around us – are united in the person of Christ dying and rising was magnificently put in words by one of my favorite religious and scientificn thinkers of the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
In 1923, he wrote these words:
Glorious Christ,
You whose divine influence is active at the very heart of matter.
And at the dazzling centre where the innumerable fibres of the multiple meet:
You whose power is as implacable as the world and as warm as life,
You whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow.
Whose eyes are of fire,
And whose feet are brighter than molten gold;
You whose hands imprison the stars;
You are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again;
It is to you to whom our being cries out a desire as vast as the universe:
In truth you are our Lord and our God. Amen.
That sense that all of us – every one, and all nature around us – are united in the person of Christ dying and rising was magnificently put in words by one of my favorite religious and scientificn thinkers of the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
In 1923, he wrote these words:
Glorious Christ,
You whose divine influence is active at the very heart of matter.
And at the dazzling centre where the innumerable fibres of the multiple meet:
You whose power is as implacable as the world and as warm as life,
You whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow.
Whose eyes are of fire,
And whose feet are brighter than molten gold;
You whose hands imprison the stars;
You are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again;
It is to you to whom our being cries out a desire as vast as the universe:
In truth you are our Lord and our God. Amen.
