My Peace I Give to You
Easter's sixth Sunday
Announcements for May 21, 2022:
If you need anything at all, please be in touch with me.
Father Wade Trainor’s first Mass is next Sunday, May 29th at 11:00am! A potluck reception will follow in the school gym. Please consider preparing a favorite dish for the celebration - you may contact the rectory office to help us plan.
OLMC School Drama Club presents The Tempest. Join us for our final show tonight at 7:00pm in the school auditorium.
Visit the OLMC Parishioner Portal for all of our recent announcements.
Dear Saints,
Peace be with you!
This weekend's Gospel passage contains one of the great promises Jesus makes to his faithful followers:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.
The word peace is used with some nuance throughout the Old Testament to mean general prosperity or well-being, safety or success, harmony among friends and family members, and harmony among nations. If this is what peace is, who wouldn't want it?
But how do we achieve peace? Saint Thomas Aquinas gives us a clue: "How can we live in harmony? First we need to know we are all madly in love with the same God."
I've puzzled over this quote for at least 12 years now, but I think I'm starting to get it.
What happens when you fall madly in love with someone or something? It becomes the very center of your heart and life. Your activities, time, emotional and mental resources, etc. are reprioritized accordingly. The greatest threat to your peace is the potential loss of the beloved.
Falling madly in love with God - the God revealed to us in and as Christ Jesus - makes us reorient our whole life around him and his purposes. Nothing much matters to us besides him, and he has proven in Jesus' death and resurrection that nothing much matters to him besides us.
That's one profound reason why we can have peace and why, as Father Jacques Philippe says in his Searching for and Maintaining Peace, "The reasons why we lose our peace are always bad reasons." We love a God whose love for us is stronger than death. We are madly in love with the God whose love for us is sheer madness.
If we but trust and follow Jesus, we will not lose our Beloved! We will not lose the peace he gives!
In the Love and Life of our Risen Lord,
Father Daniel
δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
Preparing for Mass?
Check out this weekend's readings:
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Jesus Washing Peter's Feet
Ford Madox Brown, 1852-6