Today the Gypsy people, including those of Islamic faith, celebrate Saint George, (+330 ca) who died a martyr to free the Church. Read more
Today the Gypsy people, including those of Islamic faith, celebrate Saint George, (+330 ca) who died a martyr to free the Church.
Reading of the Word of God
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
I am the good shepherd,
my sheep listen to my voice,
and they become
one flock and one fold.
.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
John 15,9-11
I have loved you just as the Father has loved me. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my own joy may be in you and your joy be complete.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
I give you a new commandment,
that you love one another.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia
Continuing his speech to the disciples during the last supper, Jesus openly confesses the nature of his love: "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you." Jesus does not feel he is diminishing himself by saying that his love for the disciples is the fruit of a larger love. Urged by our desire to be at the centre and therefore our need to appear original and not to depend on anyone else, we are ashamed to admit that our happiness depends on the love of someone else who is greater than us. It is the bitter fruit of an individualism that is polluting the whole culture and whose fruit is the crumbling of communion and the weakening of solidarity. Independence from others does not lead to love, but its opposite, to solitude. Loneliness is a very dangerous virus that causes a terrible pandemic: it saddens the soul, withers the heart, weakens the arms, makes us incapable of loving. If we remain in the love of Jesus, we rediscover the taste for mutual love and the dream of that universal brotherhood which God has placed in the heart of every man and woman and which Jesus has re-proposed as the common destination of all the peoples of the earth. Accepting this dream of God about the world is the substance of our life and our joy. Hence the urgency of involving those who have been marginalized and those who are excluded in this revolution of fraternity. The full joy Jesus promised is not made up of small, passing, individual satisfactions, but of being part of God's great plan on the world. True joy can only be found in loving Jesus as he has loved us, making us his brothers and sisters in the great plan of salvation of the world.
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
