It's All About Love
Easter's fifth Sunday
Announcements for May 14, 2022:
If you need anything at all, please be in touch with me.
OLMC School Drama Club presents The Tempest. Shows are Friday and Saturday, May 20 and 21, at 7:00pm in the school auditorium.
May’s Beyond-the-Tithe opportunity is the diocesan appeal for Peter’s Pence, which enables the Pope to respond with emergency financial assistance to aid those who suffer as a result of war, oppression, and natural disasters.
For the month of May, we have an image of Our Lady of Pochaev displayed in the church narthex. We encourage you to pray the novena, a Ukrainian devotion, during the month. You can find copies of the novena on the Adoration table, near the image - it is also printed in last weekend’s bulletin.
Visit the OLMC Parishioner Portal for all of our recent announcements.
Dear Saints,
In this weekend’s Gospel, Jesus challenges us with the simplest, clearest, and hardest commandment ever issued: Love one another.
This is the mandatum novum - the new mandate, command, or law.
Saint Augustine once offered that this commandment is new because it renews the one who obeys it. “When we love as he loved us,” he writes, “we become new men, heirs of the new covenant and singers of the new song."
I’d offer, further, that the newness of Jesus' commandment is a matter of the mode of this love, the depth and type of this love. We are to love one another in the same way that Jesus has loved us.
The mandate to love one another is given mere moments after Jesus washes the disciples' feet, and this gives his command shape and character. Take a look at the picture below - love animates the scene, but it disturbs and agitates the Apostles; it brings new life as it undermines and overcomes the old, sinful, order.
What we see in Jesus - and what we're challenged to make our own - is the life of pure self-gift that refuses to be deterred or distracted. That shouldn’t surprise us, as God is in himself an eternal exchange of outpouring, glorifying, totally-other-oriented love, and in Jesus this love takes flesh for God’s glory and the good of the world.
We can only reflect this love, which we come to know most truly and fully in and as Christ Jesus, by sharing in God’s own blessed life. "In prayer and sacrament," our mission statement reads, "God enkindles our hearts that we might bring the fire of his love to everyone we encounter."
Our Confirmation Mass last night reminded me of how determined God is to sustain us in his service with his own life of love, his own Spirit, and how eager we must then be to make that love flesh for each other and for a waiting world. Please join me in prayer for those who are newly confirmed in the Faith, who are now fully equipped for the task!
Love, my friends. That is all.
In the Love and Life of our Risen Lord,
Father Daniel
δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
Preparing for Mass?
Check out this weekend's readings:
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Christ Washing the Apostles Feet
Dirck van Baburen, ca.1616