The Mission of the Apostles

Dedicated to my sister Roselynn and my BiL Mike...

MAGNIFICAT MEDITATION OF THE DAY

Everyone needs the length of life's journey so that, aided by grace, he can grasp all the truth and beauty that was given to him in the beginning.

The desire that others meet Christ is authentic in the degree that it is accompanied bu a profound respect for their situation. It is not up to us to save the world: God saves; at best we are His instruments. He chooses the time and place in which to communicate Himself to each man; we are called to accept them. "Mission" means to generate something new within a reality which already exists...

Mission consists in recalling people's hearts from inside their situation to something that is happening among them just as it happened among us. Patience is required, the slow participation in man's deepest being. But participation is not only accepting. If we did not have something new to bring to others, we would be absorbed by them and would end up not sharing anything with them. We must be aware of the inestimable value of what we have received: we have met the One who is the answer to our deepest longings. The more this experience is alive in us, the more others will be able to perceive its newness on their own...

Courage consists in being dominated only by love, and one who loves is patient, because everything that he needs is already present in the moment in which he is living. We are sent to everyone - or rather - to each person. Every man has a heart for knowing and loving Christ. He has a name, a vocation: he is a specific and irreplaceable tile within the great mosaic that God is building in history. This awareness fills us with patience and with mercy, and makes our adventure exciting and inexhaustible.

- Monsignor Massimo Camisaca