PENTECOST

"And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning." (Jn15, 27)  

Reflection by Father Hermann Rodríguez Osorio, SJ

"...As the Father has sent me, so I send you. The Risen Lord takes them out of their hiding place, out of their selfish search for security. The peace that the Lord brings us does not always seem like ours...

We almost always seek peace by closing in on ourselves and avoiding all the risks of building our communities and our society together. In this, we are like the disciples. We are afraid of being hurt and of being hurt by it.... Of course, this fear is not pure invention. In fact, we have experience of being hurt many times in our relationships with others and we try to avoid the pain and suffering that this shock produces. But we also know that when we close in on ourselves and isolate ourselves from others and the world, we enjoy only half peace; it's a fragile peace that can vanish into thin air at any moment.

We lock ourselves into a fragile peace because we are afraid of change, afraid of others, afraid of being pushed out of our nest. Fear paralyses us, blocks us, and confuses us. We have developed a series of tactics to close our lives to the God who wants to take us out of our confinement. We literally close off our convents, our houses, our rooms, so that no one can come and disturb our lives with their insistence, their invitations, and their challenges. We can also close ourselves off by working too much... Paradoxically, we can even use prayer to prevent God from entering our lives. We can spend hours and hours praying, reciting words and repeating phrases, without offering God a moment's silence because he might say something to us that would disturb our apparent peace and comfortable tranquility.

But the Lord enters us with the breath of his Spirit, and even when the doors are closed, like the disciples in the upper room, he comes to disturb us and rescue us from our apparent tranquility. That's today's good news. May the Lord never get tired of coming into our lives to offer us HIS peace. A peace that opens us up to others at the risk of being hurt". It is a peace that opens our tombs from the outside, so that we do not continue to live like dead people, but live a full and authentic life, that is to say, a life full of questions and problems, but illuminated by God, who is the one who offers us an authentic life in abundance."