In this period before Pentecost, it's ours to join the disciples in nine days (minus a couple if we start on Sunday) of prayer, observing the Church’s first novena. As the Apostles were gathered together after Jesus’ Ascension they prayed fervently in preparation to be clothed with power from on high.

I live and preach the seasons – Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, with Ordinary Time mixed in – and I am formed by the seasons. I find that my conversations are shaped by the liturgical seasons, and even my mood often reflects the same!

Saint Augustine once offered that the command 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."

It is fitting that we honor Mary as the Mother of God and our mother this month. The more our hearts swell for love of her, the more we are made to honor the motherly – and properly feminine – love that she embodies.

This week in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we heard Saint Peter say, “We must obey God rather than men.” By raising Jesus from the dead, God has marked him out as the Jewish Messiah and the Lord of all Nations.

The three main themes of the devotion - and the focus of the recitation of the Divine Mercy Chaplet - are 1. to ask for and obtain the mercy of God, 2. to trust in Christ's abundant mercy, and 3. to show mercy to others and act as a conduit for God's mercy towards them.

Love has defeated death and is now on the march to renew the face of the earth.

One of the ways we know that we are worshipping God - that we are making him and his way our life’s priority - is that we are becoming more loving, more generous people. We’ve certainly witnessed that this year in our shared almsgiving project (a collection for the Ukrainian people that eclipsed $22,000), and I’m sure you have your own stories of how you rose to meet the demands of Love in ordinary and extraordinary ways.

Sacred images inspire us. Their beauty reminds us that God is at work in the world, and that his love will

win the day. All of this we forgo in order to enter into a veiled time; an unmediated, unseeing abandonment to

God, who himself descends into our darkness.

We can just use every moment we have left as an opportunity to love God with our whole heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love our neighbor as ourselves.