Skip to main content

Making Something New

 

Good morning, class of 2023.  You have just heard two readings from the Bible and I am


going to give a short reflection on them.  The first reading was about God creating a new thing; the second about Jesus calling new disciples to follow Him.  This year, you will be taking a theology class about the Bible and one idea that you will be hearing is this: the Bible is addressed to each of us here today, not just to the original audience two or three thousand years ago. 

 So, when we hear God saying, “behold, I am making something new” in that first passage, what He is talking about is you!  You are becoming something new today, with you choices and with God’s help.  You are becoming a high school student and more specifically, a Mercy girl.  You are beginning a new journey in your life and a process of becoming a new person. 

What is a Mercy girl? I suspect you have already begun to form an idea through your experiences here at this academy and from your encounters with the young women who are our students.  I want you to think about a Mercy girl that you have met and who helped you decide to come to school here.  What is she like?  What qualities does she have?  What are some of the things that you like about her that you would like for yourself?

Now, I want you to picture yourself gaining some of those abilities and qualities over the next four years.  Imagine what you will look like when you are ready to graduate.  In the Gospel reading, Jesus told two fishers to take their boat out into deep waters.  If you have ever been out on a boat a long way from the shores, you know that this can be a scary, dangerous thing.

What you are doing now is scary, too.  You have maybe been in the same grade school for up to 9 years.  You were probably comfortable and happy there.  Now you are being called to a new, unfamiliar place.  The water is very deep and you can’t see the shore. 

Jesus says to you, as he did to his original followers, “Don’t be afraid. I am going to do great things with you.  Come and follow me.”  You too are called to keep pushing out into the deep and to put your nets out into the waters.

God bless you, new Mercy girls. 



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Envisioning a World that Has Never Existed

  “In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed.”        ~ Anne Braden (1924-2006), Louisville racial justice activist   Anne Braden was a local white advocate in the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s.  She and her husband Carl are most famous for purchasing a house in the then exclusively white neighborhood of Shively for a Black couple.  Both Bradens were arrested as “Communists’ for their act and the house was dynamited after irate neighbors shot it up and burned a cross in the front yard. Anne was not deterred and continued the fight for the remaining fifty years of her life, founding a newspaper and several antiracist organizations.      Anne provides an exce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Black and Beautiful

    I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon          --The Song of Songs, 1:5 (trans. from the Greek LXX)   The early Church Fathers believed that the Song of Songs in the Old Testament was a love poem composed by King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (today’s Ethiopia), who was a beautiful woman with black skin. In their allegorical vision, this couple symbolized Jesus and the Church.     As Fr. Cyprian Davis writes,  “Solomon is a type of Christ, and just as the queen of Sheba came to Solomon to consult him because he was wise, so the Church comes to Christ who is Wisdom himself.  As a result, since the queen of Sheba is black, so must the church be black and beautiful.  Her very blackness is a symbol of her universality; all nations are present in her.”    In America, having black skin carries a heavy burden.  Black m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Louisvillian in Thailand aids rescues

The blueprint for Ned Berghausen's life was set early: St. Xavier graduate; a 2001 graduate of Bellarmine University with a degree in philosophy and a minor in theology; joining the Peace Corps after a year studying overseas because "it appealed to me to give something back." His Peace Corps assignment was in Bangladesh. Along the way he had written a 100-page paper on The Book of Job — the Old Testament poem that discusses faith and the suffering of innocent people. Berghausen, 24, was vacationing on Ko Phi Phi Island in southern Thailand on Dec.26 when the tsunami hurtled ashore. "I'm alive," he would write in an e-mail message to Louisville family. "I've seen unimaginable horror. ... I can't begin to tell you about it, but here's a try: Hundreds of dead people, utter devastation, rubble and ruin everywhere, people seriously injured, dying. Somehow I was unscathed. Not even touched. "...I spent 48 endless hours pulling people out of t...
Post a Comment
Read more