An extraordinary thing happens in this Sunday’s gospel: Jesus calls us his friends. Can you imagine that? His friends!  It only makes sense, then, that we spend a few moments contemplating the nature of friendship

Whether we recognize it or not, acknowledge it or not, the stark fact is that we can’t do anything on our own: we simply don’t have the strength, intelligence, stamina, or power to make one bit of difference.

In short, we belong to him. What a startling, wonderful reality: simply because we’re his, we get to enjoy a loving intimacy with God that all the money in the world couldn’t buy.

Bishop Barron once said the great hope of ancient Israel was not a “jail-break” from Earth, but rather the exact opposite: “the unification of heaven and earth in a great marriage.”

It has been said that humility is to charity what the foundation is to a building. It’s only in emptying ourselves of vanity, self-admiration, selfish interest, and pride that we allow God to fashion and fill our hearts with his loving spirit.

 But if Christ did rise from the dead, nothing can ever be the same again. If God literally became a man, and that man actually died on a cross for love of us, and that cross truly became the source of the world’s salvation - that changes everything.

During this final week of the Lenten season, I ask you to join me in making a contribution to Several Sources Shelters.

[But] Patrick’s zeal wasn’t just wild, untamed emotion; rather, it was carefully contoured by and channeled into love of his Irish neighbors.

The root word of “alms” means “mercy,” and the act of giving alms - ie, showing mercy through material gift - renews and restores within our hearts the fraternal charity to which we’re called.

Left to innate impulses, we’d constantly be on the hunt to satisfy our every desire. Lent, then, is an opportunity to order our lives according to something other than that neverending chase. It’s a chance to lift our minds and hearts to something higher.

The point, finally, is to recognize what we knew well as children: as comforting as a tattered old blanket may be, nothing can compare to the love and security of being held close in the arms of a loving Father.

By starting off sincerely and small, we will gain traction in the way of love. And if we grow in love throughout Lent and over the course of our lives, we’ll find that nothing at all can derail us from going God’s way.

So perhaps Jesus commanded silence because he wants to remind us that if all we see in him is a means to an end - if we don’t see him as a real person - we miss the most important gift of all: his friendship.

Prayer is conversation with God, and we simply cannot withstand such divine encounters intact, as it were.

We know that the years between now and then will fly by, never to return. This is their only shot to prepare for adulthood, and we take that reality very seriously. We consider every day a brick in the foundation upon which the rest of their lives will be built. Whether it’s ballet or chess, gardening or rock climbing, cooking class or cross country, poetry or physics - every hour offers some chance or other to help them become the wise, virtuous, and joyful people they’re called to be.

don’t try to change the current, just swim against it. Jesus didn’t call his apostles to overthrow the Roman regime or topple the Pharisees. He called them to live according to his saving mission and bring others into it. He calls us to do the same.

We are inundated with distraction; indeed, most young people have never known a world without it. Both for their sake and ours, we would do well to reintroduce the sanctity of stillness. It is in those moments that we will best hear God, such that he will be with us in all we say and do.

By consistently prioritizing genuine friendship with both God and neighbor, we open ourselves up to our own “magi moments” - those graced times of revelation in which we are drawn deeper into the mystery of salvation.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were committed to God’s will above everything else. They loved each other so well because they loved God more.

No matter what tomorrow brings, all we ever need to do is hear and heed God’s call on our lives.