To be Aware of What We Share: Third Week in "Ordinary Time": January 22-28, 2012

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This week’s readings all invite us to awareness, which is the first and foundational phase of growth into the fullness of life and love.

We need to actively cultivate awareness of the whole mystery that has been revealed to us, the mystery that we are living, the mystery we need to see in others.

For example, the readings this week invite us to be aware of:

• the greatest power on earth, which is good example. Think about it; and how the Holy Spirit empowers us to give it in Christian witness.

• the peace that is ours in obeying God alone, and humans only in the measure that, in doing it, we can see we are surrendering in love to God.

• the way experience impels to expression and reaches completeness only in our expression of what is within us.

• the core mystery of our Christian life: “Christ in us, the hope of glory.” This is the awareness everything else grows out of and feeds into.

• the mystery of Christ growing to “full stature” in us, and that helping this happen is the first commitment of our Baptism and should be our main preoccupation in life.

• ministry as bringing Christ to fullness in others, which is Christian love of neighbor and the “second greatest” Commandment.

• the Gift in the gifts God is giving us. Praise and thanksgiving make us aware that through all he is offering us the Gift of being like God.

• the mystery of others: seeing the “whole picture” of what they are when we are tempted to reduce them to nothing but the sin we see in them.

• the mystery of the Church: seeing the saints as well as the sinners; being aware of the sinful Church as the beloved Bride of Christ being purified for the “marriage feast of the Lamb.”

• the mystery of God’s steadfast love, explained in part by the fact God sees in others what we don’t see. Only God can read their hearts.

• the attitude of our own heart: the real self that we discover in the act of confessing sin as sin. We cannot look down on anything unless something within us has risen above it — that is, been raised by the gift of God’s sharing and our acceptance of his own ideals.

• the love and care we know God has for us when we call out to him in danger.

These are just examples of the awareness we are called to by this week’s readings. Use them to ‘prime the pump” and expand into the awareness Paul prayed we would grow into:

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I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.