Wednesday, December 21, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
If my eye is simple
Mary traveled to the Hill Country in haste and entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.  When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting the infant leaped in her womb.
“Where two or three are gathered, there am I in their midst,” Jesus told his listeners. As an adult, he could put words on what happened years before, there in Elizabeth’s kitchen.  Baby John knows it better than anyone, leaping and laughing and praising God. Elizabeth’s baby begins already to worship the Messiah, preparing the way of the Lord from day one.
Blessed are you, Mary, among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. And how does this happen, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
Two things … Mary chose community, not solitude. And she chose community, not comfort. Chiara Lubich saw this as our example, two thousand years later:
If we are united, Jesus is among us. And this has value. It is worth more than any other treasure that our heart may possess.
Community centered around Jesus provides all we need:
The basic commandment is brotherly love. Everything is of value if it expresses sincere fraternal charity. Nothing we do is of value if there is not the feeling of love for our brothers and sisters in it. For God is a father, and in his heart he has always and only his children. If your eye is simple, the one who looks through it is God.
I spend most of my day thinking about my thoughts, and thinking about what people are thinking, especially what they might be thinking about me. In my spiritual life, I spin a web around myself too often of prayer, reading, and writing. My rule of life is READ WRITE LISTEN PRAY, EVERY DAY. It needs revision, I think, because community has not much place in this life.
Again, Chiara (who renamed herself after St. Clare of St. Francis fame) writes:
People may look within their own selves, and be possessive of their own souls, their faces lifeless because they are bored or worried. The soul, because it is an image of God, is love, and love that turns in on itself is like a flame that, because it is not fed, dies out. Look outside yourself, not in yourself, not at things, not at persons; look at God outside yourself and unite yourself to him. He lives in the depths of every soul that is alive.
Our friend Sandy did that here, and as of yesterday, in Grand Bend, Kansas. We watched her reach out in many directions to find God and God’s human souls. She discovered the secret Chiara writes about:
Let your neighbors possess you. Like another Eucharist, let yourself “be eaten” by your neighbors. Put your entire self at their service, which is service to God, and your neighbors will come to you and love you.
(Song of Songs 2, Zephaniah 3, Psalm 33, Luke 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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