My Lord and My God!
ME
I will start by sharing a personal story. Some of you might know that my family and I became parishioners here in 2010, right when we signed our kids up at Christ the King school. We moved from out of state for good job opportunities and we didn’t know anyone here or have any family in Arkansas.
At the time we were also not particularly plugged into the faith.
It was about this time of the year when Mike Tarini, a parishioner, got to know that I was Italian and invited me to serve sausages at the Italian booth of RexFest. By the way, you can travel all over Italy and you will never find sausages like that cooked in tomato sauce! Despite the “authenticity” of the recipe I accepted the invitation!
Through that experience of volunteering I got to know several other people and discovered that many of them had a heart for donating their time to ministries. Others shared that they signed up for one hour of prayer every week in the Adoration Chapel. Other men were deeply involved in the MOF ministry while other couples were involved in the Marriage Encounter ministry. It was all new to me.
At the time I didn’t even know what taking a weekly hour at the Adoration chapel meant!
In the following months I got to know some of them more deeply, and few of them shared their wounds with me. Some had difficult marriages, others a recent divorce, one had a chronically ill child.
The thing I remember the most is that they were all serving at RexFest with joy while they were carrying the weight of these crosses.
My eyes became open, and like Thomas’s, I was in awe, “My Lord and my God!”
When I realized this I saw how God was working in the lives of these people and I wanted to have what they had! I wanted to carry my crosses, my anxiety and wounds like they did.
YOU
Do you ever find it difficult to enjoy life and carry your crosses at the same time?
GOD
Today we celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday. The Church couldn't have chosen a better day to open our eyes on the reality of Mercy, actually Divine Mercy, a mercy that is Divine because it goes beyond human capacity. Christ shows his infinite mercy in the gospel passage from John.
The first thing Christ does after resurrection is to visit the disciples who had betrayed him and who were hiding in fear, shame and anxiety. And what does Jesus do? Does he scold them? or preach to them? No. He brings them peace and healing. He greets them with “Peace be with you,” I don't think the disciples expected that after betraying him!
He let them know that they are lovable and that they are good, even as wounded men and women, with their shame of having abandoned him. He gives them his Spirit and entrusts them with the most intimate and powerful sacrament of healing - that only He had done up that time, to forgive sins, to free and unshackle people from the chains of their spiritual wounds.
We know the story, through the spirit that he transfers to them, these wounded souls become Apostles of the good news and agents of forgiveness of sins in what today we call the sacrament of reconciliation or confession.
This must have been what I have experienced in my interaction as a volunteer at RexFest more than 10 years ago - compassion, that I could be lovable too, that my wounds didn't have to lead me in the path of constant anxiety and negativity.
I realized that through the Church, we can get to a new reality of life. That all the sacraments, the Eucharist, the liturgy, they are all manifestations of the encounter Thomas had with the risen Christ.
I am not able to explain scientifically how this happens. But I can explain to you that experientially this is true. That the Spirit of God is real and it is in the midst of us because I have seen the fruits of it, the fruit of a change in my own life.
Our faith is an experiential faith, which means that first you have to experience the transformation, “My Lord and my God,” and once you have found it you want to tell everyone - like the Apostles!
The cross has two pieces. One is vertical and the other one is horizontal. And both are needed to make a cross. You can think of the vertical piece as the manifestation of the resurrected Christ, which the Church offers with worship, mass, the eucharist, sacraments, reconciliation.
And the horizontal piece is our personal interaction with the community. The scriptures for this Sunday show us that life in the church is lived in the community. We see this in the first reading, we see it in the disciples being together in the room, we see it in Thomas coming back a week later to the same community. And it is through the community that Thomas got to know that the risen Christ came to visit them when he was not there.
YOU
Do you embrace the faith-life with both beams of the cross? The vertical of the church, liturgy and sacraments, and the horizontal of the community?
If you are like me you probably have a natural preference for one or the other. I invite you to prayerfully identify which one you prefer and direct your prayer to grow in the other one. Because we need both beams of the cross.
In a few minutes we will line up to receive the Eucharist. As you are waiting to encounter Jesus, in the same way Thomas did, ask the Lord to reveal to you where you need to grow more. Is it in the worship of the Lord and participation in the sacraments or in engaging with the community to discover how God is working in other people’s life?
WE
RexFest is around the corner, and we need hundreds of volunteers. For me volunteering for RexFest was a transformational experience, maybe it could be for you too.
