By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
The 70th anniversary this August of the bombing of Nagasaki is followed by our participation in the Day of Prayer for Protection of Creation on September 1 as requested by Pope Francis. So much loss of life, suffering, and devastation wrought by the evil of the false gods of war and hatred find their antidote in the greatness of God whom we begin to touch, understand, and love in everything He has made.
The God who made everything, including us, calls us back to Himself over and over again by the recreation in Christ which continues in the Eucharist. Of course we know and reaffirm that, just as creation found its greatest expression in the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ, so He continues to change the created realities of wheat and grapes, with the help of mankind through bread and wine, into His Body and Blood in the Most Holy Eucharist.
The Lord continues to recreate us by grace into His own image and likeness through the Eucharist.
Our August Sunday Gospels take us from sign to reality, as we are drawn by the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes to Jesus Himself, given as sacred Food, under the signs of bread and wine in the Eucharist. We always go in faith from shadow to reality, from the created to the Creator, from Earth to Heaven. Our journey of faith in this life is accomplished through a consistent rejection of the little false gods created and worshiped by our self-will. Our path to salvation is lit by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ the Word who feeds us in the Scriptures and in the grace of the Eucharist, doing as He does always the Father’s holy will.
War begins in the heart closed in upon itself. Perhaps, in our need to open our lives and hearts to God, the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation can serve for all as a call to return again to the true God. The infinite One has mercy enough for all because it is a gift of His love which is always more than enough for each of us and for everyone.
Let us also not shrink in fear from caring enough to protect to the utmost, and on September 1 and every day, let us not forget the crown of creation: the human person especially at her most vulnerable, the fetus. In the wake of the baby-parts selling scandal at Planned Parenthood, is it not now beyond debate that we are destroying society’s most defenseless persons? If we do not care for them, we do not care for creation.
Summer vacations have given many of us the blessed opportunity to return once again to the ocean or the mountains, or other beloved places that draw our families back together for some time of treasured unity and harmony. This too is the work of God’s greatness, giving us hints of His infinity and love in providing these gifts which bless us with both the pleasure of sharing in His goodness and coming to know Him in creation and in others.
The gift of God in the continuing Incarnation of the Eucharist reaffirms that we are called likewise to a transformation. We do not merely “put on” God like clothing in the Eucharist. No, just as we take interiorly the sacred Food under the signs of bread and wine in Communion at Mass as real food, so we incorporate into our very flesh the Word of God made flesh, that we might be made new inside out.
Called as we are to surrender our sinful self-will and take on instead the holy will of the Father in Christ, we must begin with the mind and heart. These are matters of the interior life and this is where God touches and transforms us to be, like Him, holy.
Knowing that God is holy and loving Him as God is the source of our joy because we know ourselves to be holy in Him, responding to the truth of the nature of the gift of grace in Christ. Authentic joy cannot be mechanical but must rather flow from a response in love. God is eminently worthy of loving because He is all good and worthy therefore of our love. Receiving Him into us as Eucharist and becoming more fully graced awakens the joyful response. One cannot but be overjoyed to realize that the God who is always above and beyond us is also now within us and one with us as grace.
As the warm and glowing days of summer burn away in the embers of the growing cold of fall weather, we will be more strongly motivated to turn with ever greater desire to the fires of God’s ever burning love in Jesus Christ our Lord, the world’s true light.
Our celebration of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven on August 15 reminds us of God’s purpose in Christ and of His affirmation of all of creation, having made each one of us through a particular act of love in His own image and likeness. We are called, like Mary, to find our ultimate fulfillment in God forever in His heavenly presence.
A truly loving Mother, Mary continues her mission as disciple to draw us to her Son, smiling upon us as we encounter Him in the Eucharist at Holy Mass, in eucharistic adoration and in the grace by which He transforms us already now into the new creation of love divine and life eternal.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. God bless you and your families.
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(Follow me on Facebook at Reverendo Padre-Kevin Michael Cusick and on Twitter @MCITLFrAphorism. I blog occasionally at mcitl.blogspot.com and APriestLife.blogspot.com. You can email me at mcitl.blogspot.com@gmail.com.)
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