Feast of Saint Matthias, Apostle

So somehow, somewhere, they cast lots. And out of hundreds of millions of human possibilities, the lot fell to each of us reading these reflections. To be what? To do what? Well, in a word, to be a friend of Jesus – as the disciple Matthias was called.

In the Spiritual Exercises created by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, we are invited to go on an amazing journey. It starts and ends in contemplation of all the ways God loves us: all the gifts in nature, the family, the community in which we were born, a unique set of talents and skills, a call at Baptism, and a model (Cf, John 25:15) — Jesus, our friend, to follow and emulate.

In a now-famous story, Saint Peter Julian Eymard, the founder of the Blessed Sacrament Congregation, had a mystical experience as a young priest at Saint-Romans. It was so profound, and perhaps unnerving for a religious man living in a milieu of the heresy Jansenism, that he didn’t even share the experience with anyone. It was only many years later that he told his lay friend about it. The experience, not unlike Saint Ignatius’s, is best captured in the kindly advice he wrote to her and to others he counseled: God loves us personally with a great benevolent love … as if you are his only daughter (or son).

At each celebration of the Eucharist, we are invited and missioned to go forth and lay down our lives for our friends (whoever and whenever), and be bread broken in a very broken world. In other words, love one another as God has loved each of us, in deeds and actions — as Saint Ignatius stressed.

Let Us Pray:

The LORD will give each of us a seat with the leaders of his people. For the LORD, our God, is enthroned on high. He raises up the lowly . . . he lifts up the poor. Oh LORD, our God, our friend, give us the graces to do this in memory of you.