Sixth Sunday of Easter
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Today's Readings
Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; Ps 66:1-3, 4-5, 6-7, 16, 20; 1 Pet 3:15-18; Jn 14:15-21
Read today's readings at USCCBReflection
I will not leave you orphans. Jesus names the fear precisely - not loneliness in the abstract, but the particular grief of losing the one at the center. And he refuses it before it arrives: I will come to you. The Advocate is the continuation of that refusing, the Spirit of truth who remains in those who know him, who will be in them. The world cannot see or know him. Those who love Christ have already begun to know him.
On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you. That day has been arriving gradually across a lifetime of prayer and loss and return and faithfulness. The mutual indwelling Jesus describes is not a future arrival - it is a present reality that will come into focus. You have been in him; you have just been coming to understand it more slowly than the understanding matches the fact.
Peter writes: blessed be God who refused me not my prayer or his kindness. Blessed be God. Not: fortunately things worked out. Not: I got what I asked for. Blessed be God - who in all the years of prayer and petition and waiting has not withdrawn the kindness, has not stopped receiving the cry. Every prayer you have prayed across a lifetime has been received. He refused not your prayer or his kindness. Both endure.
The Rosary Today
The Glorious Mysteries move from the Resurrection through Pentecost to the crowning of Mary. Philip in Samaria and Peter and John laying hands - the Samaritan Pentecost - is the Glorious Mystery pattern made visible: the Spirit given, the joy spreading, the body of the Church extending into places the original community did not plan to go. Pray the Glorious Mysteries tonight as a meditation on how the Spirit has been moving through your own life in ways you did not plan.
Prayer of the Faithful
- For those in the evening of life who have known what it is to feel orphaned - by loss, by grief, by the deaths of the people who were their world - that Jesus's refusal would reach them: I will come to you; you are in me and I in you, we pray to the Lord.
- For mothers and grandmothers who have prayed for children for decades, that the God who refused them not their prayer or his kindness would keep every word they have spoken into the silence, we pray to the Lord.
- For those who need to give a reason for the hope that has sustained them across a long life, that they would find the words that come from a sanctified heart - gentle, reverent, clear, we pray to the Lord.
Something to Do
Come and see the works of God, his tremendous deeds among the children of Adam. Tonight, name one. Just one - one thing God has done in your life that qualifies as a tremendous deed, something that would not have happened without him. Say it aloud to someone, or write it down. The psalm says: I will declare what he has done for me. That declaration is the reason for the hope that Peter asks you to be ready to give.
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