Announcements
THE MEN'S GROUP
The Men’s Group program is a treatment program for adult males who abuse their partners. Weekly therapy sessions are conducted by professional therapists. Clients are empowered with life-changing skills that will help them to live a productive and violence-free life.
The Office of Family Life wishes to encourage all men who may be experiencing a challenge to kindly contact our Office for further information.
Telephone contacts: 322-8919 or 328-4310/2
Church Ministries
REFLECTIONS
"The God Who Thirsts"
We see God begging for a drink of water from a human being, and a sinful one at that. On the cross, too, he will exclaim, / thirst, and soon after, as the surprising result of that thirst, water and blood flow from his Heart. Indeed, he is a thirsty God, a tired God, a God looking for the companionship and dialogue of one of his creatures. How could it be that God is needy? ... In Christ the one who by nature has need of nothing outside himself has nonetheless voluntarily made himself needy, but only in order to communicate to us the life that is his. This action of making himself needy out of love may well be the greatest and most astounding work of his omnipotence.
What God, who is Love, needs is to give himself to us, thus obeying the deepest law of his nature as Love, and he can give himself to us only if he succeeds in kindling within us the light of faith that then provokes in us the yearning for union with him. The only thing Love wants is to be loved in turn, and, to accomplish this, Love does not hesitate to humiliate himself and make himself a beggar: Give me a drink, says the immortal Lord to his sinful creature ....
We see clearly here that Jesus' human thirst is the means God uses to manifest himself to us, to communicate to us his divine desire to give himself to us, and this real, human thirst of Jesus is the condition, as it were, for God to be able to give us the divine water of his grace and life. In a magnificent phrase, Saint Gregory Nazianzen calls Jesus the thirsty fountain, that is: the Fountain of Life and Love whose very reason for being is to give itself away. The bold oxymoron Gregory uses tries to babble something of the incomprehensible nature of God's Being as love. To suffer from the thirst to give himself as the life of the world: this is the whole secret of Jesus' Heart.
ERASMO LEIVA-MERIKAKIS
Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, now known as Father Simeon, is a Trappist monk. He is the author of Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, o four-volume commentary on Matthew's Gospel