Hope and Faith alive

Sunday, June 09, 2013
10th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1st Reading: 1k 17:17-24
2nd Reading: Gal 1:11-19
Gospel: Luke 7:11-17
Jesus went to a town called Naim and many of his disciples went with him – a great number of people. As he reached the gate of the town, a dead man was being carried out. He was the only son of his mother and she was a widow; there followed a large crowd of townspeople.
On seeing her, the Lord had pity on her and said, “Don’t cry.” Then he came up and touched the stretcher and the men who carried it stopped. Jesus then said, “Young man, awake, I tell you.” And the dead man got up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. A holy fear came over them all and they praised God saying, “A great prophet has appeared among us; God has visited his people.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
While lining up for my turn to dip in the public bath at the Lourdes Grotto in France in 2005, I saw a dying man lying on a mobile bed at the head of the queue.    The similarities of that scene with today’s Gospel scenario were striking. In both scenes a mother was following. But while the man of Naim was being carried to burial grounds, the man in Lourdes was being carried to healing waters. The level of hope spelled the difference.
I thought the mother of the sick man in Lourdes would lose hope when her son was not cured. Wasn’t it unfair for a dying man traveling to Lourdes on a cold month for nothing? Something inside me kept protesting. But seeing the glowing eyes of the mother while accompanying her son out of the bath, I realized it was I who had lost hope. “Hope”, wrote Emily Dickinson, “is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all”. Without saying a word the mother joyfully wheeled her son back to the grotto to thank the Blessed Virgin.
“Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect”, wrote Margaret Mitchell. Neither is God under such obligation, and the mother understood this. She was happy enough that her son was given the chance to dip in the miraculous bath ahead of the others. The Bible says that hope is one of the three things that remain in the end (the other two is faith and charity). Had she come out of that bath hopeless, she would have been left with nothing in life.
Someone tapped me by my shoulder. It was my turn to dip in the bath. Something inside me didn’t want to get into the same bath the sick man had been. Then I told myself: must I also lose faith? I plunged myself in the bath, lest I lose charity too and come back to the Philippines with nothing having lost all that really matter.— Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com. Website: www.frdan.org.
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