The last day of Kairos is never supposed to end. That’s why we talk about living the fourth. Jesus rose on the third day, and the fourth day was the first of the Resurrection. Your fourth day is the day (and every day) that you choose to live your resurrected life. One of the challenges surrounding this – one that you have already experienced and will inevitably continue to experience throughout your life – are the voices that will tell you that it isn’t real. For over two-thousand years, human beings from all over the world have been living resurrected lives through Jesus Christ. There have been naysayers, but nothing has stopped the ocean of grace and mercy flowing from the heart of our God – the pierced heart of Jesus crucified. A great skill to take with you from this Kairos experience is the testing of spirits.
Our Lady of the Rosary
One of the things that can happen during Kairos is a maturing in your relationship with God. Innocence and simplicity are holy and wonderful, but as you become an adult – not just in your human life, but in your life of faith and as a Christian – innocence and simplicity must come to mean something deeper. Children are innocent and simple by nature, but saints are innocent and simple by co-operating with the grace of God. In order to move into this deeper meaning of innocence and simplicity, we have to change our minds about what we expect from God. Today’s first reading talks about two groups of people, those who deny God because things don’t go well for them from a worldly perspective, and those who fear God because they’ve experienced His compassion, His “healing rays.”
Memorial of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
Today we celebrate an important Saint for our times. St. Therese of the Child Jesus was canonized a saint in 1925, less than thirty years after she died. That’s pretty incredible given that she was practically unknown even by the sisters she lived with. The Carmelites would send out a circular reporting on the death of its members, but when St. Therese passed away, some of the sisters who lived with her said, “Whatever will we say about her? There was nothing extraordinary about her life!” Those who knew St. Therese best, even in the convent, were the sisters from her family. They had the difficult task of promoting her cause and spiritual doctrine to the rest of the Carmel and the Universal Church. One of St. Therese’s blood sisters, who was the superior of the convent where they lived, knew how special St. Therese’s life was and asked her to write the story of her life and spiritual doctrine. This book, “l’Histoire d’une âme” circulated widely and quickly after her death and is the main reason she was canonized so rapidly.