Reflections from the Heart – February 23, 2025

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
by Fr. Ivan Olmo

“The first man, Adam, became a living being, the last Adam a life-giving spirit.” These recent days and certainly in the most recent of times, I seem to be contemplating, remaining joyfully in thought but really truly and seriously pondering and thinking about the gracious gift of God’s grace, the precious gift of the breath of life and the amazing gracious gift of all creation. Imagine, God simply forming out of nothing, creating from nothing that ever existed before and doing so with such great love and spiritual precision the very breath of creation and the amazing way God created all that is very good, beautiful in nature and simply true in being. One cannot help but contemplate the joyful thought and continue to ponder the awe and wonder of God creating us. Creating you and me in his divine image and the likeness of his kind and most compassionate heart. God is love in the truest most profoundly innocent, simplest, purest sense – in the simplest uncomplicated definition and the easiest form of the word love. God is the love in love itself. Imagine meditating and being immersed throughout the day and flooded throughout one’s life with the gracious thought, contemplating God’s initial thoughts as he thought about the first moment he thought about creating you, creating me and all humanity and the entire human family. Such a happy thought. How God first created the earth, the holy ground that he would use to form the human body like a masterpiece, his most prized creation. The sculpture God looks at most often and perhaps always as the core of his heart and the apple of his eye seeing how amazingly his creation strikes a true, pure childlike resemblance of himself. God is so very good and so are we to be. I think about the most gentlest of hands, gracious forming, sculpting, creating our hands to hold him ever so gently in his Eucharistic presence and extending our hands in service and peace to one another. Think about how carefully God formed and shaped your arms to embrace him and one another and allowing his strength to channel through you to help hold him and carry each other in the most difficult of days and most challenging of times bearing each other’s burdens with God’s yolk and strength that is easy and light. I think of how God created us to see and behold him. How he created us to hear and listen to his Word and sing with joy the song of all creation.