"Love one another as I love you."  Jesus has a great confidence in our capacity to love others.  The vocation to charity is a tremendous opportunity to make our lives fruitful.  In loving others we show them the love Christ and the Father have for them and for us.  To do this consistently takes work.  Learning to love like Jesus involves purification, overcoming sin, and a lifetime of practice.  

Mary Magdalene's encounter with the Risen Christ is truly a master class in love.   She teaches us lessons of desire, sorrow, responsibility and union with God.  Ultimately, to love is to convert, to make the center of our existence God and others shifting it away from ourselves.  

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The Holy Mass makes present Jesus' Resurrection as well as his sacrifice on the Cross.  The Body of Christ, as a resurrected body, is a gift that is given to others.  To receive our Lord is to become like him and moves us to imitate his goodness. 

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Putting ourselves into the scenes of the Resurrection, we can have our own personal encounters with the Risen Lord.  Where can we find him? What is he saying to us? How does he want to help us?  

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Jesus's death is a great mystery of our faith.  It leads to his resurrection and to our eternal life.  In accepting death, Jesus enters into the nothingness of sin and evil to conquer it from within.  Through his death, he is reborn into resurrected, eternal life.  In our Christian life, he invites us into the same dynamic journey. 

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Jesus's sacrifice on the cross is already accepted and offered by him at the Last Supper.  "This is my body, given for you."  Both the Mass and the Cross reveal to us an incredible love.  A love that we are called to imitate and a love that can make us secure no matter what happens to us in this life.  

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As we enter Holy Week, we contemplate the suffering of Jesus in his passion.  This suffering reveals to us both the gravity of sin and the unfathomable love of God for us in Jesus Christ.  To contemplate our Lord in his passion can and should be a spur to personal conversion. 

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A short reflection in honor of St. Patrick. 

God entrusts St. Joseph with his most precious possessions, his mother and his Divine Son.  We too are entrusted with a sacred responsibility in life: to care for and love God's children.  Everything and everyone in our life--including ourselves--is a gift from God, something valued by God himself.  This calls for a great reverence and respect on our part.  We can't "do whatever we want" with ourselves or others.  Like King David, our reverence for what belongs to God gives us pause whenever we are tempted to damage it. 

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"By your patience you will win your souls."   Endurance, perseverance, patience: life is hard at times and seems long, to be faithful to Christ and others we need to stick it out over the long haul.  

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