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Reflections on the Gospel Way

We can continue the love, which Christ showed to us by SEEING CHRIST IN OTHERS, and by BEING CHRIST TO OTHERS. We should strive to love others as Christ loved and to love Christ in others.

    Does any one of us have the right to say, “Christ needs me?” The answer is “Yes!” — Christ, himself, is our authority for saying that. He said he would be with the Church until the end of the world. He meant he would be active in the Church through the members of the Mystical Body — that’s us. Christ needs us to comfort others and speak kind words to others, to cheer them, encourage them and to instruct them when we are able. He needs us to nurse others, to shelter them and help them carry their burdens. We should feed them, clothe them, fight for their rights and to do good to others when and where we are able. He needs us to exercise patience with others, to be just, peaceful, generous, forgiving, charitable, and above all to pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

    As a child of God, it is natural and right, that even as we imitated our earthly parents, we should also imitate our heavenly Father. Our imitation of our earthly parents is an unconscious, spontaneous and natural human response. We do it out of love and respect and to the subjection we inherently have to their authority — their experience and resultant wisdom. Our imitation of God, on the other hand, is something that we must work at, cultivate and consciously strived for by keeping ourselves aware of the grace of God that is within us — a grace which is the enabling and driving force that spurs us on through child-like hero worship of our Father to “copy” His actions, to act as Christ did when He lived on earth.

    When someone asks a child, “Why did you do that?” he will often reply, “Because my daddy does it.” So it might be when we do something — anything in our daily lives we might reply, “We do it because our Father in Heaven does it.” God does it now through us, as imitators of Christ and followers of the Gospel Way.

    Christ himself physically walked through the streets of this earth — think about this — this incredible thought, almost beyond comprehension, yet wonderfully true! Christ, day by day in human flesh just like you and I, put his two feet solidly on the ground. As a little boy, he played with other little boys and girls. He laughed and cried. He breathed the fresh air and tasted such things that were sour, sweet, pleasant, and bitter. He touched things; felt them under his fingers, marveled at them — smooth things; rough things and things that pricked his fingers. He smelled flowers, rain, spices and the tantalizing odors of his mother’s cooking — stop again and think — his mother Mary’s cooking. Picture this real, live boy, Jesus. Picture him leaping across a stream. Watch him fling a stone into a brook and stand there while the ripples spread out and out in ever-widening rings across the water — across the earth. He mused and was amused.

    His eyes lit up when they beheld the glorious panorama of a sunrise or a sunset. His ears heard with delight the singing of birds, the moo of a cow and the sound and skitter of dry leaves before a wind rendering hymns and melodies of the psalms in praise and love to God.

A little boy stops at the foot of a tree;

His face is as merry as merry can be.

He laughs right out loud when gray squirrel he spies;

His eyes dance with fun as he joyfully cries;

“Hi, little guy with your pert little face —

With your rushing and darting all over the place.

You’re frisky; you’re furry; you gladden my day.

I’m the little boy Jesus – I’ve come out to play.”

   And he saw on His mother’s face an unutterable sorrow — yet beneath the sorrow a joy to come, too deep for words; joy in the imminence of the Redemption; she, His mother and our mother — her heart; her whole being alive to the unbelievable glory of the Resurrection; the Ascension; the Salvation of all down through the centuries who would respond and be saved and who would be close to her for all eternity in Heaven.

    This is our heritage — we are the children of God!