Reading of the Word of God
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
This is the Gospel of the poor,
liberation for the imprisoned,
sight for the blind,
freedom for the oppressed.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
Song of Songs 4, 8-16
Come from Lebanon, my promised bride, come from Lebanon, come on your way. Look down from the heights of Amanus, from the crests of Senir and Hermon, the haunt of lions, the mountains of leopards.
You ravish my heart, my sister, my promised bride, you ravish my heart with a single one of your glances, with a single link of your necklace.
What spells lie in your love, my sister, my promised bride! How delicious is your love, more delicious than wine! How fragrant your perfumes, more fragrant than all spices!
Your lips, my promised bride, distil wild honey. Honey and milk are under your tongue; and the scent of your garments is like the scent of Lebanon.
She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride; a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain.
Your shoots form an orchard of pomegranate trees, bearing most exquisite fruit:
nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all the incense-bearing trees; myrrh and aloes, with the subtlest odours.
Fountain of the garden, well of living water, streams flowing down from Lebanon!
BELOVED: Awake, north wind, come, wind of the south! Breathe over my garden, to spread its sweet smell around. Let my love come into his garden, let him taste its most exquisite fruits.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
The Son of Man came to serve,
whoever wants to be great
should become servant of all.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
The fifth chapter opens with the lover who helps the beloved to understand that she herself is his garden. The husband says to her, "I come to my garden, ... I gather my myrrh with my spice, I eat my honeycomb with my honey, I drink my wine with my milk." It is the Lord that rejoices in the fruits that his people, his Church, can offer him. The apostle Paul asks the believers to offer spiritual sacrifices to God pleasing to him [...] This, however, has nothing to do with payments required by a master. It is rather a communion of love to which we are all invited, as suggested by the two following verses: "Eat, friends, drink; and be drunk with love."
One could say that divine love urges God Himself to communicate love beyond Himself. Love that does not open to others dies; it cannot live in solitude, it always needs the beloved. The sacred author suggests responding to this love right away, without hesitation. Otherwise, one runs the risk of losing it. It happened to the woman in this very way. She recounts: "I slept, but my heart was awake." And behold in the night the husband approaches and asks her to open to him, for outside it is cold, cold even for the husband. The Lord makes himself a beggar of love, of our love. This reminds us of Jesus who chooses his disciples and who, in the moment of anguish, in Gethsemane, asks that they stay with him, that they stay awake beside him. Those three, unfortunately, let themselves be overtaken by sleep. And they leave him alone, in his sorrow. The author notes that the woman hears the voice of the beloved and that she even feels her inward yearning, but laziness makes her delay, "I had put off my garment; how could I put it on again? I had bathed my feet; how could I soil them?" The beloved even tries to force the door. At this point she gets up to open the door, but she is too late. No one is outside any longer, but the scent of her beloved who was knocking at her door remains. Then, she begins a frenzied run through the streets and squares of a city that has become hostile. Every city without love becomes hostile and dangerous. As we view this woman alone in the city we cannot but think of all of the women who are alone, exploited, raped, and brutalized by the work of contemporary cities. Some sentinels making their rounds appear and their reaction to seeing a woman alone is brutal: they chase her, they strip her, they rape her, and they wound her. Humiliated, the woman does not abandon her search to find her beloved. She then sends forth a cry to the "women of Jerusalem" so that they too, join in the search for the beloved and if they were to find him they would say to him that she "is faint with love." Any believer needs brothers and sisters to accompany him or her in the search for the beloved. One of the greatest moments in this company is common prayer which envelops us in the search for God.
Prayer is the heart of the life of the Community of Sant'Egidio and is its absolute priority. At the end of the day, every the Community of Sant'Egidio, large or small, gathers around the Lord to listen to his Word. The Word of God and the prayer are, in fact, the very basis of the whole life of the Community. The disciples cannot do other than remain at the feet of Jesus, as did Mary of Bethany, to receive his love and learn his ways (Phil. 2:5).
So every evening, when the Community returns to the feet of the Lord, it repeats the words of the anonymous disciple: " Lord, teach us how to pray". Jesus, Master of prayer, continues to answer: "When you pray, say: Abba, Father". It is not a simple exhortation, it is much more. With these words Jesus lets the disciples participate in his own relationship with the Father. Therefore in prayer, the fact of being children of the Father who is in heaven, comes before the words we may say. So praying is above all a way of being! That is to say we are children who turn with faith to the Father, certain that they will be heard.
Jesus teaches us to call God "Our Father". And not simply "Father" or "My Father". Disciples, even when they pray on their own, are never isolated nor they are orphans; they are always members of the Lord's family.
In praying together, beside the mystery of being children of God, there is also the mystery of brotherhood, as the Father of the Church said: "You cannot have God as father without having the church as mother". When praying together, the Holy Spirit assembles the disciples in the upper room together with Mary, the Lord's mother, so that they may direct their gaze towards the Lord's face and learn from Him the secret of his Heart.
The Communities of Sant'Egidio all over the world gather in the various places of prayer and lay before the Lord the hopes and the sufferings of the tired, exhausted crowds of which the Gospel speaks ( Mat. 9: 3-7 ), In these ancient crowds we can see the huge masses of the modern cities, the millions of refugees who continue to flee their countries, the poor, relegated to the very fringe of life and all those who are waiting for someone to take care of them. Praying together includes the cry, the invocation, the aspiration, the desire for peace, the healing and salvation of the men and women of this world. Prayer is never in vain; it rises ceaselessly to the Lord so that anguish is turned into hope, tears into joy, despair into happiness, and solitude into communion. May the Kingdom of God come soon among people!
For the sick, in memory of the dead, for peace
