Hello Everyone,
Updates:
1. I offered Mass today up at OLA for all of you and for Barb Giroux (by Becky and Arlene Wright).
2. Sign up for Mass can be found by clicking the link below. Again, please wait til Saturday if you had a chance to go this week.
https://docs.google.com/
3. No limit for confessions! Sign up sheet is here:
https://docs.google.com/
4. I did another video Through Saintly Eyes, this time on one of my favorites, St. John Henry Newman. If you missed it, you can find it on the parish facebook page -- https://www.facebook.com/ourladyvt
Reflection
(http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/050720.cfm)
The Gospel today recounts the scene from the Last Supper in which Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, and then calls upon them to imitate him in their love for one another. Towards the end of the passage Jesus recalls that those who receive someone sent by him thereby receive Jesus himself. Jesus has representatives in the world. The close connection between service and representatives or deputies, even, reminded me of a passage I read recently in the book A Faith of Our Own. It is breathtaking.
"According to his own express words, Christ left two sorts of deputies in the world, two sorts of human substitutes for himself besides that one invisible deputy, the Holy Spirit, who is the soul of all the love we have. But these are deputies of flesh and blood, the deputies of his power and the deputies of his weakness. The deputies of his power are his apostolic ministers, to whom he says, 'He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me.' They speak his word, they pronounce his pardon, they give his body and his blood. The deputies of his weakness are the little and the needy, and of these equally he says, 'He that receiveth one such child in my name, receiveth me.'"
"Neither sort of deputies represent Christ by virtue of their merits. The infirmity of the minsters always hinders the word, and yet faith can hear through all their folly the voice of Jesus. And the weak, the little, are not always amiable. Are we not all both little and weak, but mostly on the side of our faults and vices? Yet faith can see the passion of Christ in all, and faith is the gift of that greater and better deputy, the Holy Spirit who will not fail us, the love of God being shed abroad in our hearts by the Spirit whom Jesus was born to bring us."
It takes the vision of faith, enabled by the Holy Spirit, to see things as they truly are. And the truth is that God has established these two deputies that communicate his presence in the world. The first are the ministers of his Church, and the second are the weak and poor of the world. May the Holy Spirit fill our hearts to help us see clearly with the light of faith!
God bless you all!
Fr. Rensch