A Community of Love

The church is a community of love where the personal presence of Jesus Christ is known and where his love masters the community and builds it into a genuine unity. Normal human communities are characterized by a clearly defined restriction on membership, by a definite limitation on the commitment required of its members, and by demands which are quite explicit and acceptable to those who join. In God's church, men and women are called to go beyond this and to find intimate community with people who are incredibly different, with whom they have no natural human homogeneity, and who they usually would have no other occasion to know.

George W. Webber, The Congregation in Mission, 1964

Mystagogia #6

The Paschal Mystery of our Lord's dying and rising has transformed our lives and given us hope in our temperal life as well as in the life to come. The collects for this week ask God to refresh us with his agape love that we may in faith and hope obtain his promises that exceed all that we may hope for; always offering thanks (make eucharist) for all the good things that we constantly receive from his hand; responding to his will, giving us pride in all we do; making us faithful stewards of all the Father has given us; lifting our hears and minds to heaven where our Lord continually dwells; giving us power, wisdom, gentleness so that we may shine as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of pain and fear; giving us discernment to behold in God the source of all our talents, offering them to your glory.

The Feast of Dunstan of Canterbury

O God of truth and beauty, you richly endowed your bishop Dunstan with skill in music and the working of metals, and with gifts of administration and reforming zeal: Teach us, we pray, to see in you the source of all our talents, and move us to offer them for the adornment of worship and the advancement of true religion; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Rule of Saint Benedict

What Are the Instruments of Good Works

1. In the first place, to love the Lord God with the whole heart, the whole soul, the whole strength.
2. Then, one's neighbor as oneself.
3. Then not to murder.
4. Not to commit adultery.
5. Not to steal.
6. Not to covet.
7. Not to bear false witness.
8. To honor all (1 Peter 2:17).
9. And not to do to another what one would not have done to oneself.
10. To deny oneself in order to follow Christ.
11. To chastise the body.
12. Not to become attached to pleasures.
13. To love fasting.
14. To relieve the poor.
15. To clothe the naked.
16. To visit the sick.
17. To bury the dead.
18. To help in trouble.
19. To console the sorrowing.
20. To become a stranger to the world's ways.
21. To prefer nothing to the love of Christ.