Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 5, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/050524.cfm

Jesus said to his disciples:
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
Remain in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.

“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you
and your joy might be complete.
John 15:9-11

What would it be like if we loved as the Creator loves – eternal life flowing out from Trinitarian Love to sustain all of us for always?

Jesus says that this is how the Father loves, and how Jesus loves all of us. He says that we abide in this Love when we indeed love God above all and our Neighbor as ourselves.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:

Honestly, can there be a more ubiquitous word than “Love”, and yet we find so little of its true practice in our increasingly self-absorbed and violent culture!

If, when we “love”, it does not strengthen sacred life in another or in the world, then we have not truly loved. We may have desired, admired, adulated, or ingratiated, but we have not loved as God loves.

Let’s pray to be open and responsive to the gift of God’s Love flowing into our hearts.

Prose: from Embodied Love in John of the Cross – Richard P. Hardy, Ph.D.

For John of the Cross, being wholly converted into divine love means actually living God's own life:
The soul lives the life of God.

And the will, which previously loved in a base and deadly way with only its natural affection, is now changed into the life of divine love, for it loves in a lofty way with divine affection, moved by the strength of the Holy Spirit in which it now lives the life of love. By means of this union God's will and the soul's will are now one.

Finally all the movements, operations, and inclinations the soul had previously from the principle and strength of its natural life are now in this union dead to what they formerly were, changed into divine movements, and alive to God.

Music: Amazing Love – Peggy Duquesnel