Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter
May 16, 2024
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/051624.cfm
Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed saying:
“I pray not only for these,
but also for those who will believe in me through their word,
so that they may all be one,
as you, Father, are in me and I in you,
that they also may be in us,
that the world may believe that you sent me.
John 17:20-21
Over several Gospel readings, we have been blessed to pray with the prayers of Jesus. Just before today’s passage, Jesus has consecrated those sitting around him who are his friends. In today’s extraordinary moment, Jesus blesses us – and all those down through the ages – who will to believe in Him.
Of course, faith is a gift we cannot acquire through our own effort. The consolation of faith, the feeling of faith, is something that sometimes evaded even the greatest saints. St. John of the Cross writes extensively about the “dark night of the soul” during which he had no emotional awareness of faith. At times, St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Mother Theresa and even Jesus himself suffered a sense of isolation from God:
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
Even when we find ourselves in a spiritual desert, we still can will to believe by opening our heart and experience to the grace God offers us – by our trust, our perseverance in prayer, and our patience with our own uncertainty.
Spiritual darkness, received as a gift, can reveal an otherwise undiscovered dimension of God’s Love for us.
Poetry: The Uses of Sorrow – Mary Oliver
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Music: One Dark Night – John Michael Talbot
In this beautiful music, Talbot recants lines based on the Song of Songs and the writings of St. John of the Cross – poetic imagery that strives to describe encounter with God.
One dark night
Fired with love’s urgent longings
Ah, the sheer grace
In the darkness
I went out unseen
My house being all now stillIn the darkness
Secured by love’s secret ladder
Disguised
Oh, the sheer grace
In the darkness
And in my concealment
My house being all now stillOn that glad night
In the secret, for no one saw me
Nor did I see any other thing at all
With no other light to guide me
Than the light burning in my heartAnd this light guided me
More surely than the light of the noon
To where he lay waiting for me
Waiting for me
Him I knew so well
In a place where no one else appearedOh guiding night
A light more lovely than the dawn
A night that has united
Ever now
The Lover now with his beloved
Transforming two now into oneUpon my flowering breast
There he lay sleeping
Which I kept for him alone
And I embraced him
And I caressed him
In a breeze blowing from the forestAnd when this breeze blew in from the forest
Blowing back our hair
He wounded my soul
With his gentle hand
Suspending all my sensesI abandoned, forgetting myself
Laying my face on my Beloved
All things ceasing, I went out from myself
To leave cares
Forgotten with the lilies of the field