Do you believe this?

The Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you
Rom 8.11

We see in today’s Gospel reading, the friends of Jesus dealing with anxiety, sickness and death, part of life’s experience for each and every person in our day.

Aren’t we all Lazarus?

Are there not parts in each one of us, in me, that are dead, infected by the viruses of sins?

We are now in our final stretch of Lent which is a relief because, personally, I find Lent difficult. I find the fasting hard, but I came across a quotation from the ‘Magnificat’ which I found encouraging.

Fasting is a form of self deprivation of and a longing for the food we really need. We fast in order to seek Him day after day, the better to know His ways. We fast to make space for Christ, so that He may fill our emptiness with His redeeming presence.

This Sunday’s Gospel, John 4:5-42, is about Jesus who made a journey to a Samaritan town (it is always He who makes first move toward us) and was waiting at the well for the arrival of the Samaritan woman. Her thirst and longing bring her towards Him, though she wasn’t aware of it.

Recently my friend, was encouraging me with these words:

Always watch the mind, what it is thinking about, and always bring it back to Him from wherever it wanders off.

We are now in the middle of the second week of Lent and I’m sure some of us have already broken our Lenten Resolutions (repeatedly!!) and are feeling very discouraged about it all and tempted to just give up the attempt and pick something easier.

But maybe we should view these not as failures but as something that can be beneficial. It’s a bit like distractions during prayer. You might feel, ‘oh, I didn’t pray at all, I had so many distractions,’ but each time you realised that you had been distracted and turned back to God that was something good; that was prayer. It can be the same with our Lenten Resolutions.

God made the sinless one into sin, our sin, my sin, that in him we might become the goodness of God. And yet since the beginning of creation we have been denying our sin, that sin for which He emptied himself of his divinity, became man and endured His passion and death. We have been covering our nakedness up, hiding our reality from God, from ourselves and from one another.

While praying my Lectio Divina for the 5th Sunday of Ordinary Time the words that struck me were ‘Your light will shine like the dawn and your wound quickly healed over’.

The word ‘Light’ is repeated in the first reading, the psalm and the Gospel. Elsewhere, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus tells us ‘I am the light of the world.’ Turning to us, his disciples, He reminds us in today’s Gospel we too are the ‘light of the world.’

Consecrate them in the truth

Your word is truth.

Throughout the centuries the Holy Spirit has raised up many different forms of consecrated life – which can be compared to a plant, with many branches, which sinks its roots into the Gospel and brings forth abundant fruit in every season of the Church’s life. (cf VC 5).

When reflecting on our vocation as Dominican nuns and how we try to live the motto of our Order: TRUTH, I began to understand our consecration as being set apart for Truth.

We share with you some photos taken after Melanie our postulant received the habit on the Eve of Epiphany – she is now Sr Léonie Marie. She is pictured here with Sr Maria Breidge (our other novice) and some community sisters.

This icon, created by one of our sisters for St Peter's parish in Drogheda, is not a work of the imagination in which the artist tries to drag the onlooker inside an ideal family, but a theological teaching that exposes something of the Truth revealed in Jesus Christ. We do not enter into the icon, it is a sacred space delimitated by a red line all around it. It is the people, represented inside that space, that come to us. “The Kingdom of God is at hand!"