Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

Today's Mass Readings

I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the Evil One.

Have you ever wondered, as you walk through the cemetery, what those who have died are now doing? They have gone through a mysterious door and have entered into an entirely new kind of existence. It is toward just such an existence that our lives look each time we gather to celebrate the Holy Eucharist. In the words of the preface: Christ “was taken up to heaven …to claim for us a share in his divine life;” “where he has gone, we hope to follow.”

But we believe that we have already begun to live that new kind of life – (Col. 3:3:) for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Yet Jesus does not ask His Father to simply take us out of the world, but to guard us from the Evil One. We monks see our way of life as a way of remaining in the world while continuing to deal with the world that remains in us! Put more positively, it is a way of remaining in the world for heaven’s sake!

 We have chosen to place ourselves in the stable life‑form so that the Holy Spirit can gradually show us the truth of our being – that we belong to heaven!

 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. (1 John 3:1-5)

Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB