Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 2, 2022

Today’s Readings

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070222.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our Alleluia Verse paints the dynamic picture of Christ’s relationship with those who follow him. With due respect to the ancient “shepherd” image, the verse might speak to us better like this:

Alleluia, alleluia.
My beloved hear my voice, says the Lord;
I know them, and they follow me.

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In our readings today, we see the cycle of grace and resistance worked out in the lives of the ancients. Our passage from Amos talks about the full restoration of Israel to a place in God’s favor. Our Gospel shows that those with closed hearts cannot receive the lavish mercy of God given to us in the gift of Jesus.

What about us? Can we open ourselves to that powerful grace? Can we respond in reciprocity to this Divine invitation:

I am the Beloved. 
And my own beloved hear Me.
I know them.
And they follow me.

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Poetry: TO LIVE WITH THE SPIRIT – Jessica Powers

To live with the Spirit of God is to be a listener.
It is to keep the vigil of mystery,
earthless and still.
One leans to catch the stirring of the Spirit,
strange as the wind’s will.

The soul that walks where the wind of the Spirit blows
turns like a wandering weather-vane toward love.
It may lament like Job or Jeremiah,
echo the wounded hart, the mateless dove.
It may rejoice in spaciousness of meadow
that emulates the freedom of the sky.

Always it walks in waylessness, unknowing;
it has cast down forever from its hand
the compass of the whither and the why.

To live with the Spirit of God is to be a lover.
It is becoming love, and like to Him
toward Whom we strain with metaphors of creatures:
fire-sweep and water-rush and the wind’s whim.
The soul is all activity, all silence;
and though it surges Godward to its goal,
it holds, as moving earth holds sleeping noonday,
the peace that is the listening of the soul.

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Music: Path of Joy – Daniel Kobialka