With the Easter Season approaching our "rearview mirror" and Pentecost ahead I thought this passage from Pope Francis will give everyone a path to travel...
Peace that looks to heaven
The peace that Jesus gives is very different, the Pope said. “It’s a peace that makes you move. It doesn’t isolate you”. Instead, the peace Jesus gives leads you to reach out to others, “to create community and communication”. While the peace the world gives exacts a huge toll, the peace Jesus gives is entirely free, a gift of the Lord.
Pope Francis gave the example from the Gospels of the wealthy man whose barns were filled with grain, who thought he was doing well, and was even looking to build more. “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’(Lk 12:20)” . This worldly peace “doesn’t open the doors to the future, to heaven”, the Pope said, but is concerned only with oneself.
The peace Jesus gives, on the other hand, is always focused on the Lord. It is a peace not just for today, but for the future: “It is to begin to live in heaven, with the fruitfulness of heaven”. Worldly peace can lull us to sleep like a drug… but we are constantly in need of another “dose”. This worldly peace is limited, because it is always temporary; but the peace that Jesus gives, “is definitive, fruitful, and infectious”.
The Holy Father prayed in conclusion, “May the Lord grant us this peace that gives hope, that creates community, and that looks to the definitive peace of paradise”.