23 Sep 2021
Here, we share The Way of the Heart, a beautiful reflection on the glory of God’s love in our world. Each of us has faced our own challenges in the past year and a half, from the fear and stress and uncertainty of living through a global pandemic, to the age-old issues of hunger, poverty, illness, and war that have long plagued many parts of our world, and continue to do so while the coronavirus rages on. Today, we remember to “recognise God’s love alive”, and to “have heart for each other”, keeping the spirit of compassion alive in love.
The Way of the Heart
We know that God’s love is alive in our world.
We see that love come to life,
recognise it, every time we know ourselves
loved and respected.
We experience it every time when people
give us their trust and don’t withdraw it
even when we disappoint.
And whenever we can forgive and start again
– individually or as peoples –
we recognise God’s love alive.
In Jesus of Nazareth, in the story and event of his life,
we have learned to recognise how God’s love
shines through whenever we live
as brothers and sisters to one another.
God’s only real concern is to love, Jesus taught us;
God shows himself never more God
than when he opens his heart.
He believed in that love, enough to stake his life on it.
He opened his heart, without reserve, to all
and – as brothers and sisters can do –
he gave most of his heart to those more in need,
oppressed and sick, forgotten and unloved.
He touched a leper, looked a blind person in the eyes.
He talked with deaf and dumb,
held hands with women of ill repute.
Time was never too precious for him
to laugh and play with children.
And often he shared a good glass
with men with dirty hands.
He told – for his time and for ours –
to all who have ears to listen, eyes to see
that all these were signs of a new world growing,
of our world becoming at last God’s paradise,
God’s Kingdom: life for all, and to the fullest,
respect and freedom, justice and peace,
learning to let our hearts win it over our greed,
to rather believe in love than in power,
rather in peace than in war,
to serve one another,
rather than to oppress and abuse.
By following him in his way of the heart
– sometimes with fire in our breasts
but often too with trembling knees –
we dare to keep his dream alive,
his promise and his mission,
that our world is the fruit of God’s love
and carries the seeds of his Kingdom.
We are not blind for the darkness.
We see – too often are part of it –
oppression and war, hunger and suffering,
but we have good news to share:
by giving his heart to the world
God showed us an alternative, a new way,
promised to lead us to a new and better world,
if we dare to follow him –
and to have heart for one another.
Our way to do that is to be
missionaries of the heart of Jesus.
But we walk together
with women and men
of all colours and creeds
who dare to walk in their own way,
the Way of the Heart.
Taken from the MSC Philippine Province’s 2004 Jubilee Book
via Ametur MSC on Facebook.
