Dear hearts, this week has been difficult, hasn’t it? I am not usually attached to social media (or any media) but this week I have struggled to stop myself from visiting the infinite scroll of tragedy and horror unfolding. I am exhausted and heartbroken by all I have seen and read, by all that has happened, by the darkness and cruelty that abounds.

Then the Spirit whispers, “…But where sin increased, grace increased all the more.” (Romans 5:20).

As I pray with this gospel, the Lord nudges me toward the request we hear today from the crowd. I smile because it sounds so familiar to me as a mother.

“Tell my brother to share!”

As my heart moves with a mother’s tenderness and love toward this voice in the crowd, the Lord reminds me that He also hears me with tenderness and love when I ask him for things.

And boy have I been asking for things.

Desperately asking.

Asking my friends and family for intercession.

Praying novenas.

Offering masses.

Asking the saints for intercession.

What I desire has been filling my mind and thoughts.

They are good things, these desires

But they are not the best thing.

They are not Him.

“As the day was drawing to a close…”

This line catches me today. It is a little detail in the account of the spectacular miracle of the loaves and the fishes on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

The day was drawing to a close.

The expected time for ministry was drawing to a close.

The expected time for Jesus to heal and teach was drawing to a close.

Even Jesus’ best friends were confining his work to their own expectations, timelines and limitations that day.

I remember when I encountered these verses in John’s gospel in the early days of my conversion. By that point I had intellectually concluded that Jesus lived, died and was raised from the dead and that he very likely was who he claimed to be in the Gospels. I was reading about the lives of the saints and listening to podcast after podcast all describing intimate relationships with this man and the joy and peace relationship with him brought, regardless of circumstance. But I felt trapped in my own head. I didn’t know how I could have a relationship like that.

I have been wrestling these past couple of weeks. In my prayer journal, I’ve scribbled page after page of prayers, thoughts and questions about things that have been hard and things I don’t understand. I have wondered, in my prayer scribbles, about God’s mercy for me, about the temporal consequences of sin and about his will, among other things.

It has been a time of deep honesty and closeness with the Lord (see Rachel’s beautiful devotion from last week’s first Scrutiny Gospel). It has been exhausting, too, because alongside the heart-to-hearts with Jesus, I have also been trying to figure it all out. 

Mother Teresa said, “Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus—a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.” And his kiss is the sweetest. Even as the horror of the crucifixion unfolds. He invites me to be with him there. To open my own sufferings to him. In the nakedness is total trust. In the agony is redemptive power. In his death my belovedness is sealed. And in the resurrection my joy is complete.

Then you shall be radiant at what you see, your heart shall throb and overflow…Those words leapt off the page of the missal and they actually hurt as they landed in my heart.  They felt like a promise that was for me somehow, but also so impossibly inaccessible from where I sat alone in the pew on that cold day in January at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver.

Our Lord Jesus Christ is the King of the Universe. How striking it is that the church gives us this solemnity on the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we begin our season of waiting upon his birth in the poor manger. He is the King of the Universe. The universe! The immeasurably vast universe which holds all life, all light, all matter, all energy, all sound. He is its creator, sustainer and king. It all obeys him. "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty."

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