Jesus said to his disciples,
You see how it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead,
And that in his name repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the nations,
Beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses to this.
And now I am sending down to you what the Father has promised.
Stay in the city then until you are clothed with the power from on high.
Then he took them out as far as the outskirts of Bethany,
And lifting up his hands he blessed them.
Now as he blessed them,
He withdrew from them and was carried up to heaven.
They worshipped him and then went back to Jerusalem full of joy.
And they were continually in the temple praising God.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you,
Lord Jesus Christ.
This is one of the moments that I sincerely wish I could have seen.
The culmination of the ministry of Jesus Christ.
Going back up to heaven to be with the Father.
I wonder what the Pharisees and the Sadducees said.
If they even knew about it.
If the disciples of Jesus maybe stuck out their tongues and said,
See,
He is the Messiah.
He's not the Messiah you expected,
But he is the Messiah.
And he has fulfilled every single thing he said he would.
He has fulfilled the prophecies that came before him.
I also think that maybe these disciples in their joy felt a bit of trepidation.
Weren't you?
What now?
Okay,
We wait.
Jesus said to wait,
But what now?
This reminds me of a discussion that I had with a dear friend a while ago on cancer.
Where they mentioned to me that if you have cancer,
Your whole life becomes focused on survival.
And if you are blessed then to be able to survive cancer,
And you sit with your finger in your ear,
Because what now?
What do I do with all of the time that I had spent in survival?
What do I do with all the time and all this energy that I had spent just on living?
Now I'm alive and now what?
It is so easy to forget the wonder of what had just happened.
It is so easy to start letting the ego plan our lives moving forward.
Christ is gone.
What now?
What now?
What now?
That we stop living,
Stop being in that beautiful,
That perfect moment.
This moment where Christ heads back up to heaven.
We read,
As he blessed them,
He was carried up to heaven.
This final blessing of Christ.
I wish I could have been there to receive that blessing.
And yet,
I do believe that we still receive that blessing of Christ every single day.
And whatever happens in our lives,
That blessing doesn't stop.
Christ never stops sending his blessings down on us,
Continuously blessing us.
But then how do we explain all the trauma that we go through?
How do we explain all the heartache,
All the sadness,
All the disease,
All the killing,
If Christ is blessing us?
And I think it comes back to the promises of Christ.
It comes back to the idea that we were never promised lives that were going to be blissful.
We were never promised lives without strife,
Without pain,
Without being killed for what you believe in.
What we were promised was love.
And what Jesus came to do was to remind us,
To awaken us through his death to the concept and to the truth that we are not alone.
That God is never not with us.
Because God is.
God is everything.
God is everywhere.
So when we are going through these times of strife,
These times of loneliness,
These times of disease,
These times of fighting,
God is there.
We just can't see him sometimes.
We just can't feel God.
Because in those times of our anxiety and those times of our fear,
We close our eyes for a moment and it's natural and it's human to do because we become overwhelmed.
But that overwhelmed does not mean that God is not there.
So then how does that make life easier?
How does that translate into something that I can take home and something that I can understand and something that I can live?
When I take these ropes off,
What is the fact that God is always in me,
Around me,
With me,
Through me?
What does that mean to me?
That's a very good question.
It's a question that I ask myself often.
This great divinity is here.
Now what?
God is.
One thing that I believe that we are missing in many of our lives is the time with God,
The timelessness with God.
It is sitting,
Just being with God,
Praising God,
Without necessarily asking God to take away whatever is happening to us,
Without necessarily thinking about anything at all,
Just to sit in the beauty of God,
Just to have our meditation time,
Our prayer time,
Our making music time,
Or whatever we do to connect to the divinity that is around us,
That is in us,
That is in each other.
Just being in the moment,
Letting the ego worry about the ego,
Because it does,
And it's most probably for most of us not going to stop.
So let it worry,
Let it go.
But while it's running on repeat,
That negative talk on repeat,
If we can put it aside for a while,
Let it run,
Honour it,
It's there to keep us alive.
And while that runs,
We then certainly become away in the stillness that is our not-selves.
We become away of that stillness,
And in that stillness we become away of the presence of God.
We become away that nothing is not God.
Nothing is not God.
Try it one day.
Try it for a week.
Try it for a month.
Not just every day,
Or once a day.
Why do we pray?
We pray and we say the Divine Office,
We pray the Divine Office,
We say the Rosary,
We pray the Rosary.
We have all our prayers so that we can return to that being part of the not-being that is God.
Sounds very out there and spiritually loaded,
Doesn't it?
When we pray,
When we sit,
When we meditate,
When we let go of everything,
Very practically we return to Source.
And when we do it continuously,
We start moving from within Source and we start becoming aware that everything outside is outside.
That is also part of God.
But that's not what we are.
The outside is not what we are.
The inside is not what we are,
And that we can only start grasping once we truly set time.
And let time not matter in our connection with God.
When we truly let go of the need to have a structure of connection with God.
Every morning from 8 to 9 I meditate or I pray.
Beautiful.
But when we start living from within that pray,
Then we don't take time to be with God because every single moment we are then away that we are with God.
And God is every way.
And God is… God is.
Amen.
