Do this in memory of me

 

How often have we said the Creed and breezed through the line “I believe in the Communion of Saints” without giving it much thought? Sure it’s a phrase that we have heard and repeated throughout our lives without really thinking about it as more than just a line in a prayer.

The early Christians referred to all members of the community as “saints,” not necessarily because they achieved moral excellence, but because they were made “holy” by belonging to a “group” whose lives were connected in serving God. In this sense community and communion are synonymous with church which goes beyond a mere place of worship.

The Communion of Saints like the vine and the branches, connects all people in present time with those who came before, and those have yet to come...it’s an eternal continuum. God is love. God is eternal. Love is eternal. When we love one another. We share the presence of God in us with one another. The ancient Sanskrit word, Namaste is traditionally used at the end of a yoga practice. However, its meaning goes beyond that of a salutation. In a spiritual sense we acknowledge the presence of God in all creation: The Divine in me bows to the Divine in you. Namaste!

Yet, when we think of Communion it’s only natural for us to think of the Eucharist as the sharing of the Lord’s Supper with one another. When we recite the line in the Creed, "I believe in the Communion of Saints" we remember that we are sharing God’s love and when we receive and give the Eucharist we share His love... in memory of Him. (Mark 14:12-16,21-26).

In this dynamic act of sharing, the presence of the Trinity becomes clear to us: Love is in us and shared through us for Him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in Jesus name, Amen.

It is more than just the line in a prayer, isn’t it?

My Prayer to the Holy Trinity

 

Dear God, I don’t want to pass the buck but your being within me hasn’t been discussed too often or too clearly. I hate to sound critical but this doctrine on the Indwelling has been passed over rather superficially in my early religious training. I never heard this from the nuns in grade school or the brothers in high school.

Yet Lord, all the while, deep down I wanted your love and the reassurance of your love as I always tried to earn it. So you can see why your Indwelling presence strikes me as strange and foreign.  Now I’m being told that while they are beautiful and comforting, it’s not necessary to say the prayers I was taught and had memorized whenever I want to speak with you. No, rather I should converse naturally, in a familiar and relaxed way as if you’re “one of the family” because you Eternal Three, have made your home within me. (Matthew 28:16-30)

Of course I hesitate. My religious training emphasized that you were the one who would punish me if I even talked in Church... and as a youngster I remember confessing it. It was a sin. I was trained to be meticulously respectful when I came into your presence, as if your presence was only in my Church. (I remember feeling guilty for a long time when Sister Janice caught Ralph and me playing the theme from “Dragnet” on the organ in the choir loft, one Saturday afternoon after “confession.” Who knew she was preparing the sacristy for Sunday Mass! I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to face her wrath on Monday or roast in hell forever?) Now, I’m being told that your presence is within me! And I’m supposed to be comfortable with you. I feel as though I should hold my breath.

Dear God, now I’m learning not to think of grace as the absence of sin but as a gift of your presence, Father, Son and Spirit within me.  And that you are closer to me than I am to myself and that you want to be for no other reason except that you love me. That is so beautiful that I really want to hold on to this feeling forever.

I’m trying to understand that the more aware, conscious, alert, and attentive I am to your triune presence within me, the more I will find you in all things. Dear God, I really do want this.

Frankly, I must admit that in the past I hadn’t given much thought to your presence, your intimacy, you activity within me. What a love you must have for me! A genuine, boundless, omnipotent, all-present, eternal, home love within me! I certainly need a mature faith for this. I no longer can go just gliding along the surface of my old religious practices anymore, can I?

Thank you Lord.

In the Name of the Father, from whom we came and to whom we are going, and to the Son, in whom we find our true self, and to the Holy Spirit, the divine aliveness in our innermost life. Amen                                                                                            (John 3:16-18)

(adapted from  Ronald T. Haney SJ, God Within You, Mysticism for the 21^st Century, pp. 150-151)

He will take from Me and declare it to you

Pentecost preserves the memory of Jesus through the Holy Spirit as our community’s faith is both restored and renewed in breadth and depth through our love for one another. God and Love cannot be contained and must be shared. God is love.

David Steindl-Rast writes in Deeper than Words that The Holy Spirit is the awe-inspiring power of life and love. We differ only by the degree to which we open ourselves to this power. If we patiently cultivate courage and openness, we will become more and more aware of the Spirit which allows us to know God within.

In our Creed when we proclaim our belief in the Holy Spirit, we acknowledge the Trinitarian God as the ‘Father,’ the ultimate mystery from whom we come and to whom we are on our way; the ‘Son,’ in whom we find our true Self; the ‘Spirit,’ the divine aliveness within our innermost life, Here we touch upon the very core of faith.

We are charged with remembering all that Jesus lived while he was with us. ( John 15:26-27 Acts 1)The Spirit is the ultimate power of the Gospel through which the Word becomes flesh in us, and are no longer just words. We become those words and they define who and what we are. We remember not as if it were yesterday but because it is today; we live the memory now and again and again.

“When we remember, we leave the present for the past. To say it better, we bring the past into the present and give it life alongside the tangible realities we are compelled to consider. Not physical presence but love leads us to live with this remembered person even in his/her absence. When love is strong, the memory of this may be even more dear and more real than the reality of those who are present. Our memory of another confers the present upon him, gives him further life in our life, and keeps a moment of the past from drifting away or fading into death.

We are fed and nourished by communion of life in which our lives intersect in memory and merge into a common experience. No lover forgets. No beloved is forgotten. The memory of love is life; the memory of another becomes ourselves. So when the communion of believers remembers Jesus, Christ is present and is brought into the present with his grace by the power of the Spirit…The gift of the Spirit is fidelity to the memory of life’s mystery and confidence in the mystery of its future.” (Anthony Padovano, Dawn without Darkness)


When you're awake, the things you think
Come from the dream you dream
Thought has wings, and lots of things
Are seldom what they seem

Sometimes you think you've lived before
All that you live to day
Things you do come back to you
As though they knew the way

That they all may be One

 

John proclaims the Divine presence of God in Jesus in his very first Gospel with the words: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God… And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And now, as he announces the end of his physical presence as the incarnation of the Father on earth, Jesus passes the baton to us. How beautiful it is to hear Jesus pray for his apostles, not alone in a garden or in the desert but in their very midst. It really is nothing short of astonishing to imagine this gospel as a beautiful model for us. In this Gospel of John (John17: 11-19) there is no request for Jesus to “teach us how to pray,” but rather a beautiful prayer for the protection of those Jesus loved as he was preparing to physically leave this world. This is the Lord’s Prayer according to John.

Holy Father, I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. 

Here John relies on mystical words that speak to us in a place in which personal images of reality and life itself reside. John invites us to picture what being in a relationship with God really means. Note, I did not say “understand,” but rather, I used the word “picture” in an effort to prompt our imaginations and all our senses to feel the words as a palpable experience, and know what being in a relationship with God actually feels like, tastes like, and smells like. It’s at the essence of what we know when we say “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” God shared our humanity fully through Jesus as we through Jesus, share fully in God’s divinity. Anything less than this relationship would be considered to be a just a mere “acquaintance” of God.

 

You are My Friends

 

 How beautiful is it to know that we are all connected to each other through the love of God. As Jesus prepares to leave his earthly realm, he speaks of our being connected with him and each other through his telling of the story of the vine. His juxtaposing himself with us and with the father creates an image of a vine that, in keeping by nature, becomes intertwined into itself as it goes on and on. If properly nurtured and cared for, tender growth becomes hardened branches and produces fruit. Throughout this chapter (John 15:9-17) Jesus wants us to know that God is not at the periphery of our being, he is at the center with us and Jesus. We are made to feel one with God and Jesus as he asks us to abide in him, remain with him, and be at home with him.

Jesus reinforces this connectedness by removing any sense of status or hierarchy between himself and his followers: “You are my friends…I know longer call you ‘slaves,’ because a slave does not know what his master is doing, I have called you friends because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. As friends we are equal with Jesus and with each other and have a solemn obligation to love…look out for and care for each other.” 

Whether we like one another or not, Jesus commands us to look out for each other's good - even to the point of giving our life. The point is not that we should be just friends but we are friends for a purpose to bear fruit - fruit that lasts.

We relive the experience of the vine and our connectedness in the celebration of the Eucharist with the solemn words that end the mysterious event of the consecration. Through him, with him, and in him in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever. Through him, because only through Christ does humanity have access to the Father and because his existence as God-man and his work of salvation are the fullest glorification of the Father;
With him, because all authentic prayer is the fruit of union with Christ and at the same time buttresses this union, and because in honoring the Son one honors the Father and vice versa; 

In him, because the praying church is Christ himself, with every individual praying member as a part of his Mystical Body, and because the Father is in the Son and the Son the reflection of the Father, who makes his majesty visible. The dual meanings of through, with, and in clearly express the God-man’s mediation.

This prayer is the prayer of the ever-living Christ embodied during his human life. St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (1891-1942): Before the Face of God