June Trinity
John 17: 6-11
Father, I have revealed your name and your being to all human beings whom you have led through destiny to me. They were yours; they lived out of the powers that worked in folk and family, and now you have given them to me, and into my working that lives in the Self, and they have kept your word in their inmost being. Thus they have recognized how all the spiritual power that you have given me truly proceeds from you; for all the creative spiritual power that you have given me, I have brought to them.
They have taken it up into
themselves and have recognized that in truth I come from you, and they have
gained insight, and trust that I have been sent by you. I pray to you for them
as individual human beings; they who are to live out of the power of the self, as
individuals, I pray to you for them; not for mankind in general, but for the
human beings which you have given me. For they belong to you, just as
everything which is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine, and the light of
my being can shine in them [I am revealed in them]. I no longer live in the
outer world, but they live in this world.
My whole being is devoted to
you. And I am coming to you. Holy
Father, you who give healing to the world, keep in your name and in your being
all whom you have given to me, so that they may be one even as we also are
one.
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| Antonio de Pareda |
John 17: 6-11
May 31, 2015
This reading is taken from
Jesus’ conversation with his Father the night before He died. It is a summation
of the inter-relatedness, the interweaving of the Father and the Son and us. Through
this interweaving we can become those human beings filled with the healing
Spirit, those out of whom the light of Christ shines. This particular reading
is also read sacramentally two other times in a person’s life: it is read at
the children’s Confirmation, when their individual souls and destines are born
out of the family milieu. It is also read again just before death, at the Last
Anointing. Jesus’ words thus can form the bookends of an individual human
biography, if they so choose.
This reading also underscores once again the motifs of Pentecost: that each person’s individuality is to be preserved; that we are to live out of the power of our selfhood. And that our selfhood and our destiny, voluntarily connected to Christ, will lead us to the Father and His unifying Spirit. As the poet John O’Donohue says:
May
you recognize in your life the presence,
Power and light of your soul.
May
you realize that you are never alone,
That
your soul in its brightness and belonging
Connects
you intimately with the rhythm of the universe.
May
you have respect for your individuality and difference.
May
you realize that the shape of your soul is unique,
That
you have a special destiny here,
That behind the façade of your life
There
is something beautiful and eternal happening.
May
you learn to see your self
With
the same delight,
Pride
and expectation
With
which God sees you in every moment.[1]
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