“O God, keep us faithful to the gift which they received with such joy and handed on at such cost.” This is an excerpt from a prayer for the feast of the apostles Simon and Jude.  The gift they received was their ‘mission’, their mission of proclaiming the gospel, and this they handed on with the cost of their lives.  For the solemnity of ‘All Saints’ why am I beginning with these very moving words?  When I heard this prayer, I thought immediately that it expresses what saints do. They receive their call from God with joy, and they live it to the end, until the day when they hand it on to others, and with such cost.  

Today is the canonization of Cardinal John Henry Newman. He was a prolific writer, an intellectual whose heart very much balanced who he was, what he preached and what he wrote. I will share multiple quotes to support this statement!

To begin: “God has created me to do Him some definite service. God has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.”  

As I was pondering what to focus this morning’s chapter talk on, I turned to the third conference we had from Fr. Michael Dodds for our retreat.  In staying with his theme for our retreat ‘The Hiddenness of God’, he begins this third conference with a reference to the ‘sin’ of Adam and Eve who now because of their ‘sin’ are hiding from God!  Fr. Dodds writes: “The point of the story is that sin, or acting against God’s will, was not part of God’s original plan.  It arises from a free, human decision.  But that decision initiates a new dynamic between God and human beings, who now try and hide from God”.  This new dynamic between the human person and God is a dynamic of ‘wills’, that of God’s will and that of the free will given by God to human beings.

In our retreat with Fr. Michael Dodds, OP, our second conference was on ‘the hiddenness of God’.  This hiddenness of God, the God who is unknowable leads, Fr. Michael said, to some people denying the very existence of God.  What I was struck by in this conference was the connection Fr. Michael made between the hiddenness and unknowable dimension of God to ‘faith’.

Revitalization:  to impart new life or vigor…to restore to a fresh condition.  What if this word became a sacred image for us as a community? No question: we worry about our future, the immediate future of our individual lives and the life of our community. Such ‘worry’ is part of our humanity and there is nothing wrong with it.