July 4, 2021

I  am your power
 

Dear beloved sisters and brothers in Christ Jesus.

Soon it will be the summer vacation. Be sure that you are in our prayers. This coming weekend on we would have the possibility to have 25% of the church capacity (75 members inclusive of the Celebrant) for our liturgical gatherings.You are welcome to join any of them, first come first served. I like to share a part of the reflection of Richard Rohr for a thought on where our true power lies.

Many prayer groups have experienced this sort of tension as they start to develop into a community. In the early days of the New Jerusalem community, it was so nice when we were just a few people who prayed in a room together! We could go merrily on our way, trusting in the Lord, and everything would work out fine. But then the group got larger. We had to have more meetings; we had to take care of this and that; we needed more organization. At that point, it gets very easy to stop trusting in God and to start doing it all ourselves.

We often take ourselves too seriously, believing in ourselves rather than in God. Often, our actions do not come from a place of prayer and listening to God, but from what we want to do. Look at the pitiably little fruit of 2,000 years of Christianity, with the systems of injustice in which we have been totally complicit! So much of it has been our thing, our power. God has communicated in a million ways that “I am your power,” but we do not believe and trust what we cannot see or prove. Instead, we bow down to lesser kings (like institutions, nations, wars, ideologies, etc.) that we can see, even when they serve us quite poorly. Thus, the entire history of the necessary tension between charism (“authenticity”) and institution (“concretization”) is set in motion. It will become the framework for most religious and spiritual journeys. . 

God bless you all!  
Fr. Eslin Pereira, CMF