Mother Marie’s reflection focused on four points for making disciples and revitalising the life of religious communities:Thomas Merton, the American Cistercian monk who died in 1968 gave an interview in California on his way to Bangkok just before his untimely death:
We already have everything, but we don’t know it and we don’t experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already have… You start where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there… Thomas Merton (trip to Asia).
To make disciples and revitalise our communities we need to:
- Value and cherish our vocation.
- Commit to serious lectio divina that will shape our choices,
- Be visible in a society which would like us to be hidden and silent,
- Keep our relationship with Christ as central in our lives.
Pope Francis: “How I long to find the right words to stir up enthusiasm for a new chapter of evangelisation full of fervour, joy, generosity, courage, boundless love and attraction” (no. 261 Joy of the Gospel)
I would like to end with St Paul’s prayer – which is my prayer for you:
“This, then, is what I pray, kneeling before the Father, from whom every family, whether spiritual or natural, takes its name: Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted on love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and depth; until knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God. Glory to be him whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine; glory be to him from generation to generation in the Church and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.” Eph 3: 14-21
