\u201cI live and you will live,\u201d Jesus tells his disciples. You and I are both alive right now, so this seems easy to wrap our heads around. This is life, right? I\u2019m living it right now. Is there more to life?<\/p>\n
The fullest life that Jesus reveals is so much more profound than we could have known without His revelation to us: \u201cI am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.\u201d Jesus is in the Father, and we are IN Jesus, and Jesus is IN us! The One Who is the Way, the Truth, and Life itself dwells in us, and we dwell in Him, in the Father. This \u201cmutual indwelling\u201d that is true life is harder to wrap our heads around. But Jesus was very clear that this is the whole point of the Kingdom, and that God\u2019s joy is to dwell with us, because He loves us and created us precisely for this.<\/p>\n
What is love? How do we love the Lord we cannot see? Jesus tells us that the one who keeps His commandment loves Him. What is Jesus\u2019 commandment? To love one another as He loved us. And if we love Jesus and love one another for love of Him, we will be loved by the Father and we will truly know Jesus. Loving one another as Jesus loved us is a tall order \u2013 He loved us infinitely, loved us all the way to the Cross and beyond, pouring Himself out utterly for us. He \u201cloved me and gave himself for me,\u201d as St. Paul says (Gal. 2:20), and continues to take care of me in every single moment.<\/p>\n
The world in which we live and the busywork of much of our lives does not easily resonate with the vibration of divine life and love. Sin has obscured this and made it hard to keep in mind. But praying and loving (true, self-sacrificing love) re-tune our hearts and minds so that they again vibrate with the eternal rhythm of the divine, so that it can become the \u201cbackground music\u201d of all we think and say and do! The Advocate, the Spirit of truth, poured into our hearts remains with us always, and keeps us open to the will of the Father in every circumstance and situation.<\/p>\n
How do we attune ourselves to this Holy Spirit? Prayer. In prayer, we are still enough to listen for love and conform our heart to its demands. In prayer, we give the Spirit opportunity and permission to continue and complete His work in us, so that we walk generously in His ways of love. As we advance in loving obedience and true, self-sacrificing love of others, all our thoughts and words and actions will become attuned to the will of the Father, and our lives will at last resonate with the beat of the very Heart of God.<\/p>\n
\u2014\u00a0Kathryn Mulderink<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Reflection provided by diocesan.com. Reprinted with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Background Music: Life, Love and Prayer \u201cI live and you will live,\u201d Jesus tells his disciples. You and I are both alive right now, so this seems easy to wrap our heads around. This is life, right? I\u2019m living it right now. Is there more to life? The fullest life that Jesus reveals is so much more profound than we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-reflections"],"yoast_head":"\n