19th Sunday Divine Love: making us human

There is an old phrase, it’s kind of a Christian-Catholic guilt phrase…
“Do you want to make baby Jesus cry!”
Well, I wonder if St. Paul is doing a bit of the same in our 2nd Reading?  Applying a little guilt? “Do you want to make the Holy Spirit cry?
Whatever he is doing, he is actually making a deep theological statement on our reality, and the reality of salvation, and if we are living that salvation.
God is three and yet one.  This is our dogma and the mystery of the Holy Trinity.  
What unifies God as three and one is that Holy Spirit of Love.  
Divine Love unifies, it unites, it binds yet without loss of personhood.
Divine love see and brings forth all that is good within the person of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and shares it with the others.
We are created in the image of this Love.
We are created therefore to live in this divine love.
We receive this love from the Father, through the Son in the Holy Spirit.  We call it Grace.
Baptism signifies the pouring of grace, and the Holy Spirit, into our very person.

Confirmation signifies our being fully seal with that Grace and the Holy Spirit.

Eucharist opens us more and more to the mystery of the meaning of that Grace.
See, Grace makes us truly human.
Grace pulls us out of self and into relationship with others.
We signify that we are in a “State of grace” by our relationships to others.
Paul writes that a life of grace expresses itself through compassion, forgiveness; it is imitating Christ and living a life of self-giving love.
To the extent that we live bitter (read sarcastic and cynical) angry, violent lives full of yelling and reviling...is the extent that we have refused grace.
Tell me what seems to be more prevalent these days?  I am not just talking on the internet and in the news…
How about in our own persons?
Last week’s reading from Ephesians, Paul said that believers of Christ must not act like the unbelievers.  Christ invokes a change in us.
Jesus revealed this divine love, he preached it, and died and rose so that we can open ourselves to the fullest extent to receive this divine love.  
Receive it and let it change us.
I love those stories of conversion, especially those persons who were once full of hate and disdain towards people of a different country, religion, race, politics...and they got to know another as a person, and it changed them.
Grace in action.
I also love stories of people so hurt by others, or someone else, and they learned to forgive, learned to not seek vengeance, but learned to make positive changes.
Grace in action.
Sometimes life gets very difficult, very challenging, very stressful.
Sometimes life does not go the way we want.
We can react by going inward, live with the anger, live with the petulance, griping, complaining, hurling insults, ranting and raving about the state of the world and all the people in it…
Or
We stop, breath, open ourselves to a better way…

Grace.

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