Because when the blood, sweat, and tears are shed for love, there’s no wiser or more enduring choice to be made.

Nourished by Jesus’ own body and blood, we find the strength to journey wherever God leads us, for as long as it takes, persevering in the love that endures forever. 

 The Good News is that, no matter how mixed up and muddled we might be, Jesus remains eager to satisfy our deepest hunger. Put another way, Jesus is our salvation: When we turn over our hearts and lives to him we are restored and rejuvenated by his love; we are healed and made whole by his mercy; we are nourished and sustained by the Bread of Life, his Body and Blood.

 As with his other mighty works, there's more to Jesus' feeding the multitude than meets the eye. Think, for instance, of the reality that nothing Jesus does is for show. He's never gunning for power or pursuing a political advantage.

 The good news is that he has come to deliver his flock, offering both a warning and a word of comfort in his wake.

Today, as we celebrate Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s feast, we would do well to entrust ourselves to her all over again, so that our hearts may become ever more like hers: filled with relentless love that even death cannot defeat.

Paradoxically, it is when we too can become weak and vulnerable - when we accept and embrace our utter reliance on God for everything - that we will become most like him.

Every time we choose Jesus, he does the same for us. From an angle of skepticism it might seem impossible to the point of ridiculous, but we know from centuries of wisdom that he is in fact on a rescue mission, and we’re the ones he’s come to rescue.

Because once we remember that we worship a God whom even wind and sea obey, and that he loves us exactly as we are, the power of others' opinions begins to fade.

It’s fitting that we would encounter the mustard tree’s humble beginnings on Father’s Day, because so much of fatherhood is about those moments of silent vigilance.

“[But] “only human” is all we need to be, because there’s someone else with us in those moments, and he is the source of unity himself.”

Jesus did not suffer and die for the unnamed masses. He does not offer his body and blood to some random stranger who happens to be in the communion line. His love is not poured out on everyone interchangeably. It is poured out individually, in a unique friendship that will never be repeated and can never be replaced.

Most of us will never fully understand the mystery of the Trinity, but God gives us enough clues that we can start to imagine the awesome, all-engulfing power of its reality. We can have some small sense of the immense love that courses without pause between and among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

But we should take heart, because there’s a much more powerful force at work - the only source from which power can truly be generated. The more we follow it and turn our lives and relationships over to it, the more we will live and build together fruitfully as one.

A mother’s heart is marked by something beyond reason and rationality. It is self-gift in the extreme, offered whether it will be recognized or not, appreciated or not. It really is a remarkable embodiment of heaven on earth, and it’s only fitting that we would honor and celebrate the Christ-like love that is motherhood.

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.