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.
Jesus returns: he breathes the Spirit upon and within us. The Spirit was already given but now it is given through Christ in an incarnate manner where we know he is ‘flesh of our flesh’. We ‘know’ in our experience that ‘we move and live and have our being’ in, through and with Christ, the complete manifestation of God. In the book of Ezekiel we hear God say: “I shall give you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you; I shall remove the heart of stone from your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead. I shall put my spirit in you, and make you keep my laws and sincerely respect my observances” (36:25-27).
He is departing so that he may be with us always, through the Spirit…Departing and then returning in another way….a way that asks us to be aware, present, listening, listening in the monastic sense of ‘listening with the ear of the heart’. This new encounter with Jesus had to be different for the disciples who knew him in the flesh…perhaps it was easier for them than for us, for our senses today are so directed to the outer, so preoccupied with things that are not ‘eternal’.
A popular Guest House recipe that is vegan, easy to mak...
