With paradox there is tension between two seemingly opposing realities.  This tension is like a golden thread linking the two, sending divine impulses as one experiences either side of the polarity.  What does this have to do with today’s gospel of the Beatitudes (Mt 5:1-12)?  Blessedness is promised.  Blessedness is promised to everyone.  At the center of the gospel way is paradox.  To follow the One who said: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ is to enter paradox.  The cross is the paradigm of the Way, it is the greatest paradox of Christian faith.  There is no resurrection, no life, no growth of love without the cross.  And this teaching today of Jesus is saying something similar: blessedness emerges from struggle, hardship, including suffering.

We just celebrated All Saints.  It is a profound solemnity of the Church.  Each year our first Vespers opens the solemnity of All Saints with this amazing text from St. Symeon the New Theologian: “The saints in each generation, joined together to those who have gone before and filled them with light, become a golden chain, in which each saint is a separate link, united to the next by faith and works and love. 

Right now, let us ask Jesus, like the apostles: “Increase our faith”.  To ask something, to desire something beyond our ego demands, what would this be like?   To desire and thus to ask from the depths, ‘Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord’…I cry, I desire for my faith to grow.

“The lamp of faith requires being continuously nourished by the heart-to-heart encounter with Jesus in prayer and in listening to his Word,” said Pope Francis.

St. Luke’s gospel for this Sunday has three pericopes, all on the theme of prayer.  The gospel begins with one of the disciples asking Jesus to teach them to pray.  And Jesus’ reply is the Lord’s prayer.  Jesus spoke in Aramaic, and he begins by addressing God as ‘Abba’.  Most scholars assert that the use of Abba in his native language was very personal and intimate: Abba in Jesus’ language is more like ‘daddy’ in English.  What is this saying?  For Jesus God was very close to him in an intimate bond of love:  a covenant of love between Son and Father.  This covenantal relationship was confirmed at his baptism.