A Reply to Love

from the foot of the cross

 

For the 5th Sunday of Lent, Sr. Elizabeth reflects on Jeremiah 31 and the faithful, covenantal love of the Lord.  She reviews the five previous Old Testament covenants from Adam to David and explains how God established a new, unbreakable covenant with his people.

In our latest video, Sr. Sarah Rose shares a little background on the Books of Chronicles (everyone's got that book in the Bible memorized, right?) so we can get some context for this Sunday's first reading. She also looks at the Gospel of John, Chapter 3 - a micro-bite of the Good News of God's intense love for us.

God calls us to a greater trust and to a more sacrificial love, in imitation of Christ, who surrendered Himself into His Father’s hands on the cross. This week, Sr. Teresa shares about this Sunday's first reading from Genesis, which foreshadows the self-sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary. She tells the story of what happens when God asks Abraham to take his only son to a mountain and sacrifice him, and compares it with her own personal vocational journey.

Sr. Anna Rose joins us again as we continue our Lenten pilgrimage.  Now, with Jesus, we go to the desert. Is it a place that we flee, or a place where we remain? Sr. Anna Rose shares about how the desert could actually be a place where we desire to remain, and also about how Jesus shows us what Noah prefigures centuries beforehand.

Today we begin our journey through Lent, as well as our weekly video reflections. Sr. Anna Rose introduces our new series by sharing how we can view Lent through the lens of 'covenant'.  God loves us so much that He will stop at nothing to bring us into relationship with Himself.

Jesus loves to teach me through our family downtown. One recent lesson was in the school of mercy. Besides being a bit of a buzzword in the Church these days, mercy is one of our community’s charisms and is the focal point of our community formation this year… I hear about it a lot! But so far, my most poignant lesson in mercy has come from observing mercy at work downtown.

Just about two weeks ago, we entered as a Church into the Year of St. Joseph. It is the Holy Father’s prerogative to choose to dedicate a year to a saint, but it was God the Father who chose this carpenter from Nazareth to be Mary’s husband and Jesus’ father. In these weeks leading up to Christmas, I’ve been meditating on the Gospel passages that tell this story. I’ve been stunned by those whom God chooses (carpenters, young girls, shepherds, etc.).

My Advent has been spent, thus far, in quarantine and isolation. This was at first because of contact with someone who had COVID, then also because I contracted it myself. At no time have I been terribly sick, and I was pretty happy (especially before isolation, when I still had the run of the house!) to throw myself into all sorts of projects I’d relegated to the back of my desk drawers and bottoms of piles: an editing job I was helping with, piano practice, making Christmas gifts, and mending clothes. But there’s really only so much “work” one can do in one’s room! I finished the editing job, mended all my clothes, was banished from the piano, and even got out all my Christmas cards – with nearly a week left in quarantine.