Scripture: John 8:33-36
Journal: Do you live more like a slave or more like a son or daughter? What does it mean that Christ have made you free indeed? How do you live like it?
Reflection: We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening. True, since this awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we will dread His coming in proportion as we are identified with this exterior self and attached to it. But when we understand the dialectic of life and death we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality.
The mind that is the
prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is the captive of its own
desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a supernatural
desire. For how can I receive the seeds
of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God
if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? God cannot plant His liberty in me because I
am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free. I love my captivity and I imprison myself in
the desire for the things that I hate, and I have hardened my heart against
true love. I must learn therefore to let
go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me. I must learn to “leave myself” in order to
find myself by yielding to the love of God. —Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton
Prayer
Closing
Prayer: Thank you, Lord Jesus, for setting us
free. Help us not, although free, to
enter the chains of bondage and slavery once again. Help us to live as sons and daughters of
God. Amen.
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