Friday thoughts from Sr. Mary Roberta

"Oh, dear! There goes all the newly-pressed wine, and we thought the old wine skins would hold it!," complain St. Luke's imaginary vintners in his Gospel for today (5:33-39). "Well, of course," says Jesus, "because the fermenting wine burst those old, thin wine skins." And it happens like that with the new, abundant life Jesus brings us, which will "burst" open the thin-skinned lives of those of us who are full of old prejudices and who stubbornly cling to them (v 39).

St. Francis de Sales weighs in on it this way in his Treatise on the Love of God:

...to live in the world and in this mortal life contrary to all the opinions and maxims of the world [the world's old wine] is not to live a merely human but rather a super-human life. This is not to live in ourselves, but out of ourselves and above ourselves. Since no one can in this way go above himself unless the eternal Father draw him, it follows that such a life is a continual rapture and a perpetual ecstasy of action and operation [caused by Christ's new wine, the new life He brings us].

Blood of Christ inebriate me! [Anima Christi]


Sr. Mary Roberta Viano, VHM