From our beautiful and ancient Church heritage comes many prayers to aid us in the surrendering to Jesus of our loveless thoughts and self-protecting ways. Yet it remains a seemingly monstrous task to actually do it: to surrender to Him. And perhaps it is because at the center and foundation of surrendering is the primary truth of our own powerlessness.
Small children, in their innocence, do things out of love not fear, and that’s how God wants us to be with Him …
A decade back, I prayed myself through the Ignatian retreat that the Jesuit father took Mother Teresa through in 1959 (found in appendix B of Come Be my Light). Sometimes the wording he gave in his instructions stood out for me. One such time was his instruction to her that stated, “To spend a day in reparation for the sufferings I have made Jesus bear for me.”
I grew up hearing Jesus suffered for me on the cross. But I’ve never heard I made Jesus suffer for me. Wow, a paradigm shift.
I recently read that in the U.S., 10,000 people daily will reach age 65 (retirement age). This begs the question: How prepared am ‘I’ to accept aging?
In the secular world, people are characterized as outliers in many ways. Not too long ago, a well-funded and orchestrated protest against the one-percenters of the ultra-high wealthy took place as Occupy Wallstreet. In the world of science and education, the outliers are those with the ultra-high IQ. In this Gospel which we recently heard in mass, Jesus is calling us to belong to a different group of outliers: those who truly love Him.