The Return...

Yes, it has been a long recess, an extended absence, a prolonged vacation... but the prodigal son has returned. I am back after approximately five months of "neglecting" my blog and its viewers. I feel that an apology is in order, because I seem to have abandoned you; however, I have returned, and I will try to prevent my incredible amounts of work from keeping me away from this blog.

I suppose that this post will be more on personal reflections than theological-biblical commentary.

Recently, something that has come to my attention is the fact that humans are incredibly, fantastically weak. I speak in generalities but mean to point specifically at myself. Amidst the piles of work and commitments to attend to (however pleasant), it becomes so entirely simple to neglect the One for whom we were created, to whom we owe our being, and by whom we have been redeemed. Our Savior, our God, literally lowered Himself from an entirely spiritual, purely existential Divine nature and became the lowest of all rational creatures. The God of the universe, the God that has no beginning and no end, the Alpha and the Omega, the One who holds everything in existence merely by His will to love us... this very same God descended to earth and became a human. From the moment of his conception, He was both God and man. In the hypostatic union, the human and Divine nature were found in one subsistence and one person, in our Lord Jesus Christ. Even before birth, John the Baptist leaped in Elizabeth's womb when Mary, only a few months pregnant with God Himself, approached to greet her. Jesus was both human and Divine from the moment of conception and was born miraculously, without causing any physical "side-effects" like normal children do at birth (If you'd like evidence of this, please comment and I will address it at that time).

After this, Jesus grew up like us, slept like us, ate, drank, cried, laughed, joked, bled, sweat, and died like us. He experienced the fullness of life as a human so as to give us an example of how to live as if in heaven while suffering on this earth. Jesus showed us how to help God's kingdom come and His will to be done, and he taught us how to pray. In his life, Jesus taught us everything we could possibly need or want. If that weren't enough, he took upon himself the weight of the entire world's sins, the sins of each person throughout history, and laid them on his own, perfect back. He took the sins of Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, Augustine, Francis of Assisi... he took on the sins of Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, Hitler, Stalin... he took on your sins and mine. Then, after the horrible agony and passion that he endured, he gave his perfect life for us, in order to make it possible for us to make it to heaven.

We are incredibly weak, and we have been showered with grace from birth, all in hopes that we will recognize God's love and love Him in return. He wants us to enter into His life-giving love; Father loving the Son without reserve, Son loving the Father equally perfectly, and the rivers of pure love that they share IS the Holy Spirit, which God pours upon us through the sacraments. What a gift!

Let us pray that we may come to recognize our weakness, His love, and our complete need for Him in all things, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.