A Glimpse of His Love

13th Thursday in the Ordinary Time TODAY'S GOSPEL (Luke 13:18-21), the Lord described before the disciples the all-encompassing love that the Christian community is called to be for the rest of the Creation. This love is not our own but an offshoot of the seed of love that God has placed in our hearts at the time we were conceived. The God of love calls us to be children of love, elder creatures called to take care of the Father's creation. As we can see, God's love is not meant to be exclusive, neither it is meant to be confined to ourselves. The God who loves all the Creation called us to love those outside ourselves too. Even married couples are not meant to confine their conjugal love between each other. They too are called to love their children and the community outside their homes. It is this expansive love that tells us how God of love cannot help but love us. It is simply in his nature to love. God is the Father who nurtures us no matter what. God is the...

13th Monday in Ordinary Time IN TODAY'S GOSPEL (Luke 13:10-17) the Lord has made manifest to us another glimpse of his boundless love. Despite the darkness in the heart of the woman bound to Satan for 18 years, he looked unflinchingly in that darkened heart, and dispel it from there. And did it from the overflowing love he had for the woman. In the heart of the woman, his love conquered the darkness finding its home there.   The scene also tells how legalism can be a serious obstacle in the free expression of love. The heart that serves justice and upholds what is right has the tendency to harden in the process because justice and right will find compassion unacceptable, weak, and unstable. Of all the sense of justice and rightness in the heart of the Pharisees watching Jesus deliver the woman from hands of darkness, they failed to understand the compassion streaming from the Lord's heart. They can only see what made the action wrong; not what made the action-loving. ...

29 Wednesday in Ordinary Time IN TODAY'S GOSPEL (Luke 12:39-48), the Lord disclosed to the disciples a characteristic of God's will--it comes as it wills, and without warning--in the same way that the Holy Spirit will, later on, behave towards the young Christian church.   Some people may understand such unpredictability as "unfair" because it does not allow enough time for a person to prepare himself to meet the Lord. It is like giving an extemporaneous speech, a minute or two before you have to deliver it before a crowd of critics.   But there is a beauty in the delightful surprises that the Lord pulls on us almost all the time. It puts our lives into unending excitements over limitless lack of expectations. It brings us naked before the Lord, free from all the masks and pretensions that adults have learned to acquire through the years in their dealings with fellow human beings. It allows us to tell the Lord: "Here I am, Lord, today. All that I have ...