MASS OF THE AUGUST 1

FRIARS OF THE ORDER OF PREACHERS
GENERAL CHAPTER OF PROVINCIALS
Bogotá – 2007

MASS OF THE AUGUST 1
By
Fr. Dominic Mendonca, O.P.
Provincial Prior
Province of India

Moses on the mountain, listening to God and talking to Him, and Moses on the plain communicating the divine will to the people of Israel, is a perfect image of a Dominican. The reading from the book of Exodus tells us that the face of Moses was shining because of his encounter with God. In contemplation we are lost in God and God’s light is shining on us; we reflect the radiance of God. We become less and less of ourselves and more and more of God. In contemplation we acquire a new face and new vision and we see everything from God’s point of view.

The face of Moses was radiating to such an extent that the people of Israel were afraid to look at it and Moses had to put a veil over his face while he was talking to the people. The people heard Moses and accepted the divine message not primarily on account of his words; Moses was, in fact, not an eloquent man. People listened to him because his face was radiating divine light. This was also true of our holy father Dominic who is called the light of the church, Lumen Ecclasiae. He could touch the hearts of so many people and bring them back to the true faith mainly because God’s light was shining on him and through him. We have several other examples in our Dominican tradition. The source of St. Catherine's extraordinary apostolic life was her relationship with God, a God whom she called a "gentle lover," even a "mad love," as she said, "a fire that takes away the chill in my heart."

In our preaching, too, it is the reflection of God in us that the people like to see. What will convince the people and make them accept our message is not our learning and the persuasive power of our arguments, but rather the light of God shining on us as a result of our intimacy with Him. Our preaching needs to be, in the words of John, the proclamation of ‘the word of life which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands’ (1 John 1:1). People are not interested to hear from us ideas and theories of God. They like to hear from us the God whom we have met and experienced.

The two parables in today’s Gospel bring out the greatness and the incomparable value of the kingdom of God, the price that needs to be paid in order to possess it, and the happiness of those who have found the kingdom. Our Dominican vocation, reflecting God’s light through our contemplation and passing it on to others through our preaching, is a precious treasure, a priceless pearl. To possess it, we had to sell all that we had; we had to leave our fishing nets behind. But our ‘giving up’ and ‘selling’ is not just once and for all. It is not just at the moment of our novitiate. It has to be renewed daily; it is an ongoing process.

The parables point out clearly that they had to sell all that they had in order to possess the treasure and the pearl. It is not a little bit or a part of their wealth; they sold all that they had. It reminds us that God’s first commandment to the people of Israel was, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might’ (Deut 6:4-7). God asks from us the totality of our being. The novelist, James Baldwin, says “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself--that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving”. God wants not our possessions but ourselves. Kahlil Gibran puts it beautifully, "You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give."

God can ask from us the whole of ourselves because first He himself has given all of himself to us. In his boundless generosity ‘God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us’ (Rom 8:32). To love us and to save us Jesus had to fully strip himself off his glory and die on the cross. God loves each one of us with his totality, with all his heart, soul and might and wishes the same generous offering from each one of us. Our ‘total giving’ to God is only a response to his ‘total giving’ to us. And we need to do it in a spirit of joy just as the man who found the treasure hidden in a field, in his joy, goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

In the Eucharist we celebrate the total giving of Jesus on the Calvary. We are invited by him to receive his love and share it with others. In one of his homilies Archbishop Oscar Romero says, “When we leave Mass, we ought to go out the way Moses descended Mt Sinai: with his face shining, with his heart brave and strong to face the world’s difficulties”

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