RISE AGAIN

1 Maccabees 4:36-37,52-59; we price your glorious name, O mighty God; Luke 19:45-48

"For this is our life: to rise again continuously and to resume our journey."  Pope Francis

Here are the words of Pope Francis this past wednesday Audience.  In the context of teaching about God's forgiveness and the ecclesial dimension of the forgiveness that is why do we go to a priest to celebrate the sacrament of forgiveness.  It is beautiful teaching.  Christ is the head of the church and just  as the Holy Spirit passes through the wounds of the body of Christ to bring forth forgiveness so god continually uses the body of Christ the church to breathe forth the forgiveness and such he commissions priest and bishops to be minsters of his forgiveness.

I recommend it as a worthy read and look into the Ecclesial dimension of God's forgiveness.

But at the end as he speaks of our sins and need for forgiveness he states the following: For this is our life: to rise again continuously and to resume our journey."

We are not created to quit.  We are not created to stand down.  We are not created to fold.  We are created and redeemed so that we may rise up continuously and continue forth on our journey.

What a beautiful reality check for us.

Today we also celebrate the feast of St. Cecilia the patron of musicians and singing.

I thought i would include a quote form Pope Benedict on the primacy of singing

"THE IMPORTANCE of music in biblical religion is shown very simply by the fact that the verb “to sing” (with related words such as “song”, and. so forth) is one of the most commonly used words in the Bible. It occurs309 times in the Old Testament and thirty-six in the New. When man comes into contact with God, mere speech is not enough. Areas of his existence are awakened that spontaneously turn into song. Indeed, man’s own being is insufficient for what he has to express, and so he in­vites the whole of creation to become a song with him: “Awake, my soul! Awake, 0 harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn! I will give thanks to you, 0 Lord, among the peoples; I will sing praises to you among the nations. For your steadfast love is great to the heavens, your faithful­ness to the clouds” (Ps 57:8f.). We find the first mention of singing in the Bible after the crossing of the Red Sea. Israel has now been definitively delivered from slavery. In a desperate situation, it has had an overwhelming experi­ence of God’s saving power. Just as Moses as a baby was taken from the Nile and only then really received the gift of life, so Israel now feels as if it has been, so to speak, taken out of the water: it is free, newly endowed with the gift of itself from God’s own hands. In the biblical ac­count, the people’s reaction to the foundational event of salvation is described in this sentence: “[T]hey believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses” (Ex 14:31). But then follows a second reaction, which soars up from the first with elemental force: "Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord” (i 5: i). Year by year, at the Easter Vigil, Christians join in the singing of this song. They sing it in a new way as their song, because they know that they have been “taken out of the water” by God’s power, set free by God for authentic life. [The Spirit of the Liturgy, (SF, CA: Ignatius, 2000), p. 136]

The singing of the Church comes ultimately out of love. It is the utter depth of love that produces the singing. “Cantare amantis est”, says St. Augustine, singing is a lover’s thing. In so saying, we come again to the trinitarian interpretation of Church music. The Holy Spirit is love, and it is he who produces the singing. He is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit who draws us into love for Christ and so leads to the Father."

Singing is a lover's thing. May it become our thing this day.

St. Cecilia pray for us