One of our sisters received the following quote which from a friend some time ago regarding the temptation to respond to the needs of our world during this Pandemic of Covid 19 – yes there is a great need for nurses, doctors, social workers, carers of every kind. So why do you, Dominican Nuns, continue to be heedless to the cry of broken humankind at this time? Why are you not out doing something useful?

Edith Stein (now St Benedicta of the Cross) was faced with the same dilemma at the beginning of World War II – she had been a Red Cross nurse in World War 1 and so was obviously recalling that time. Now a Carmelite Nun, here is how she responds and encourages her sisters:

With St. John Paul II, on his 100 Birthday we look at Mary, through his eyes …

Mary is a “woman of the Eucharist” in her whole life.

If we wish to rediscover in all its richness the profound relationship between the Church and the Eucharist, we cannot neglect Mary, Mother and model of the Church.

How does one enter into the Event that we call Holy Week single-mindedly and prayerfully?

With JESUS of course – but then again, so much is happening to Him that it is hard to hold to any one moment intensely, if you want to live all of them. It seems too much like floating on the surface without being immersed in the mystery.

This year, maybe a good word to sit with and to carry through the week might be: Truth.

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.’