The “Grow” section of our parish website details a number of practical ways we can nurture this sacred friendship, and I invite you to check it out.

No matter how you participated in last Sunday’s festivities, you bore God’s image to those you met. I can’t think of a more fitting way to honor Our Lady than that.

We have been knitted together by God’s love, and it is for us to walk together in solidarity as he moves and works among and through us for the good of his whole world. This is our chance to manifest our commitment to him and express our willingness to let his peace, generosity, and love flow through us to everyone we meet.

As we take part in our own parish revelry, we take time to remember that Mary is with us every step of the way as we journey towards her beloved son. Our devotion to her inflames our love for Jesus, that our lives might similarly manifest the power and benevolence of God to everyone we encounter.

This weekend’s Gospel passage has Jesus preach one of the central paradoxes of Christian life. He says to his apostles, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Put another way, we discover who we are by going all in on Jesus.

What I’d offer is that we’re meant to be living lives of eternal purpose. What do I mean by that? I mean that, here and now, we are meant to be about God’s work in the world. As humans, made to be God’s image bearers, we need to be about the work of bringing earth to heaven (as priests) and bringing heaven to earth (as kings).

As it relates to fatherhood - in its manifold conceptions - it’s probably best to start with God as Father. From there, we can say that all fatherhood is related to God; that our fatherhood is real and good inasmuch as it reflects and embodies God’s fatherly love. In that sense, I pray and strive to be worthy of the name.

That Jesus’ faithful followers can be identified with the Eucharist is remarkable. It also just makes a lot of sense. The Council of Trent declared that “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained” in the Most Blessed Sacrament.

There are many reasons why knowing God, as he is in himself, is important. The one that always comes to mind for me is the fact that we are made in the image and likeness of God. If we want to know who we are, then we must in some measure know who God is.

In the Gospel author’s account of the first Christian Pentecost, we should see - 50 days after the new and definitive Passover - that the Apostles’ being filled with the Spirit and bringing people to trust and follow Jesus is like the bundle of wheat offered to God as a sign of the abundant harvest to come.

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.

Motherly love is self-effacing. No, it is self-sacrificial. This for-the-other love of true mothers, biological or not, brings to life the love of God in a way we so desperately need today.

So what is the way, the truth, and the life if not love all the way through? There's simply no room for arrogance in our hearts and lives when we hold fast to Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life.

God only knows us by name!

By raising Jesus from the dead, God has marked him out as his people's Messiah and the Lord of all Nations.

Here we see the power of trusting in Jesus: in him we receive the mercy of God, and in him we are made vessels of his mercy (his bountiful and forgiving love!) to everyone we encounter.

My friends, the risen Jesus is the first part of God’s re-created world, set free from the disfiguring forces of sin and death. We enter this new world, we live into this new world, by LOVE.

As we wrap up this period of preparation for Jesus’ resurrection, there’s a lot to look forward to in our celebration of the Church’s holiest days. The Triduum services this week – Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil – are really one extended liturgy.

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.

Remember that this season is all about love. Lent needs to make us more loving. We can break it down and say that prayer is about loving God more, fasting is about living a disciplined self-love, and almsgiving make us more attuned to the needs of our neighbor.