WILL GOD REALLY LIVE WITH MEN AND WOMEN?

PRAYER MOMENT  

Tuesday 11 February 2014, feast of Our Lady of Lourdes (Southern France), where many sick people go on pilgrimage. A tiny few are healed physically but many find peace in accepting their sufferings in union with the One who poured out his life for us. It is a time when we specially remember the sick; we visit them and pray with them and for them..

WILL GOD REALLY LIVE WITH MEN AND WOMEN?

Pause. Be still in the presence of God.

Reading. “Yet will God really live with men on the earth? Why the heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built!”  (I Kings 8: 22-30).

Reflection. This is Solomon’s good period, before he goes a bit wild. He has built the magnificent temple in Jerusalem and dazzled the Queen of Ethiopia. But he asks this rhetorical question: is it possible that God can live among us? Well, we know the answer. We have just emerged from the Christmas season. God is “with us” so much so that it is open to us, women and men, to attain an intimacy with him, a “communion” with him, which the ancients could not even dream of. “I never tire of repeating the words of Benedict XVI which take us to the very heart of the gospel,” Pope Francis writes in his letter Evangelii Gaudium, ‘being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.’”

Prayer. Lord, you come to offer us participation in your divine life. Help us to grasp what this means and welcome this life day by day. Amen.