Holy Saturday, today, evening marks the end of Easter preparations and the beginning of Easter. I just finished one of the books I was reading during Lent, and so I think it appropriate to note a couple of the meditations there which struck me as calls for a new beginning. The book is Quiet Moments by Fr. Benedict Groeschel; 120 short readings. Here are 2:
99. Start and Push Limits
Mother Teresa once confided to me that if she had not picked up the first homeless man in Calcutta four decades ago, she would never have been able to help hundreds of thousands who are dependent on her and her sisters and brothers today. We have to start and keep going. We cannot all be Mother Teresa, but we can be who we are supposed to be. What we lack is the willingness to try and the trust to go on. I will not change the world or the Church --- at least I hope not, because if I were to change them I would probably change them for the worse. Only God changes things for the better. But he does this through us if we give him the opportunity to use us. There is no limit to how much God gives us except the limits that we put on him by our self-centeredness and lack of trust. We must constantly be aware of the limits we place and must relentlessly push these limits back.
79. Preserved Pain?
An effective way to defeat yourself is to keep alive all kinds of hurt feelings. The Pharaohs of Egypt used to collect their tears in vials and keep them in sacred places. They were buried in the pyramids with their tears. The Pharaohs aren’t the only ones. If you want to live on resentment and hurt feelings, you’ll have an unhealthy diet for the rest of your life, pure psychological cholesterol. How many people spend much of their energy lamenting, crying, being unhappy or sad or driving themselves literally crazy by living on resentments toward those who failed them? Yes, people do fail us. Some don’t even know they’re failing us; some don’t mean to fail us. Some are so preoccupied with their own problems, they don’t even know what they’re doing. And some just don’t care. The motto of the follower of Christ must be, “Keep going ahead Don’t look back.” If our Lord Jesus Christ had been someone preoccupied with his own hurt feelings, none of us would have been saved. Mercifully, God does not nurse hurt feelings. For our own spiritual, as well as psychological, good, we must forgive those who trespass against us.
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I have started going back to daily mass and adoration after receiving my pandemic shots. However, Easter Sunday masses tomorrow will be crowded and with the recent uptick in cases (one nearby suburb had nearly 100 new cases yesterday), I decided to attend a Sunday parking lot mass at a nearby parish. The mass from the church is also broadcast over the radio, and at communion time we drive through a circular drive to receive communion. Tomorrow I will also be picking up communion for two homebound people I know. I visited one this afternoon who had been hospitalized for a month for depression; I trust the communion will help her spirits. At the moment, this seems to be part of who I am supposed to be, following the motto: “Keep going ahead.”
Who knows what tomorrow will bring, but “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”
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