Monday, September 18 : Benedict XVI
The contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive… This is hardly man’s great «yes» to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will… Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise «in ecstasy» towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing. Concretely, what does this path of ascent and purification entail? How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise…? The word agape, as we have seen, becomes the typical expression for the biblical notion of love… This word expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other… Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice… Love is indeed «ecstasy», not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: «Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it»… (Mt 10,39; 16,25; Mk 8,35; Lk 9,24; 17,33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit (Jn 12,25). Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfilment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.
maronite readings – rosary,team
