Losing and Finding

Giving up is part of life – you give up your time and money for your children and grandchildren. Parents say it was worth it for the joy in their faces. A person goes to work for the poor and gives up a better job. You want to do more study and know you have to leave some leisure aside that you like. In sport we sacrifice a lot to train and to do well. But something else comes through for us when we give up. If it’s real and true we get back a lot. It seems strange for Jesus to say – lose your life to save it. He’s talking about losing good things, to get better.

This can be a big challenge in a culture today that is very ‘me’ conscious. We can find that personal concerns take total precedence, without enough care for others. But as long as one person on this globe is hungry or homeless or seeking refuge, the work of Jesus is never done.

Losing life and saving life with Jesus is a call to community, to neighbourhood and the world, to make our part of the world a better place.

My own life may be my main concern, my circle of care may extend just as far as myself, ignoring care in a sustained way for the stranger or the outcast, then I am called to the challenge of the gospel to lose selfishness, and find the generosity given in my heart by God.

Think ahead to today or this week.

Offer love and service to God.

Lord, teach me to be generous in your service.

Donal Neary SJ

In the Ordinary

Jesus avoids attention after his work of healing the deaf man. He’s not a quarter hour celebrity.  He didn’t want admiration, he wanted love to flow into and out of ourselves – doing good quietly.  The best of things are ordinary.  In the ordinary, Jesus worked the miracle and in the ordinary we will hear new things.

The theologian Karl Rahner SJ was once asked whether he believed in miracles. His answer: “I don’t ‘believe in them’, I rely on them to get through each day!” Indeed, miracles are always present within our lives. Miracles of birth, of love, and hope.

The first reading today sees more in the desert than a wilderness and flowers: we see and hear beyond created things to the healing work and word of the creator.  Maybe we might listen to new voices about God and life in our conversations – I heard recently a young person talking about the suicide of a friend and how this brought him to realise how much we really need God.  His chat strengthened my faith.

Can we recover the simplicity of life with the small miracles that get us through every day? Like a sudden burst of sunrays in the midst of trees.  All of us have something new to say of God and of life.  And we get more than we know out of the simplicity of life.

Think today of something small that can remind you

of something deeper and of God.

Praise to you O lord for simple surprises in my life!

Donal Neary SJ

With Lips or Heart?

With some vegetables you eat the leaves and the outside. With an artichoke we get to eat the heart. It’s the best bit.  The best of religion is of the heart.  Jesus today talks a lot about that – contrasting lip service and hearts far from him.

The people who were wondering about sincerity.  They kept the law but then were intolerant of weakness in others. They missed often on people’s goodness and so they talked of people who didn’t wash hands, cups and God knows what else.

We say that otherwise too –
       Get to the heart of things –
a person has great heart –
put your heart into it –
their hearts are miles away.
The ‘heart‘ is the place of true religion.

The heart is a dangerous place.  The head will try to be sensible –‘ let the third world look after itself, after all they are spending on war,’  but the heart will be broken by the hunger of the poorest.  The head will tell you that you need sleep but your heart will get up to care for a baby or an elderly parent.  So the religion of some of Jesus’ time was safe –the rules were kept but was there love?

In prayer allow God touch your hopes to love well in life.
Teach me your truth O Lord, in the sincerity of my heart.

The heart of religion is found in the heart of God. Kahlil Gibran writes in his book ‘The Prophet’:
‘When you love, do not say: God is in my heart
– say  rather I am in the heart of God’.

Donal Neary SJ