This afternoon, dear friends, we are celebrating the life of a community of thousands of people, who over the last hundred years have been sharing the eternal and divine life of God. Scripture refers to us as a people belonging to the household of God, members of the Body of Christ on earth, and temples of the Holy Spirit. We are not saying we are better than anybody else. But we do believe that great gifts have been given to us during our lives to guide and prepare us for eternal life in the Kingdom of God, when Jesus comes in glory. One of the greatest of those gifts in the meantime is the Eucharist which we celebrate as part of the community of the God who washed his disciples’ feet and then offered his life to the Father that they might share his resurrection.
Most of us here today are probably conscious of being members of a family, maybe belonging to a particular organisation in which we are employed, perhaps also affiliated to a certain political party, and we are mostly Catholics who are or were part of the community of St Dominic’s Parish. I thought it might be good for us to take the opportunity this afternoon to reflect briefly on what is distinctive about us as part of a Dominican parish.
A large part of that is how we understand and live God’s relationship to us. For we see ourselves as images of Jesus, being sent into the world by God the Father, as Jesus was, to demonstrate for the world the way into eternal life. Some of us do it by preaching the Gospel, all of us do it by trying to live the Gospel of love.
In a Dominican parish there is something special about the way we do all this. Our focus in prayer and in our active life is on other people. They are our principal concern. And so it is never hard for us to think of what to pray for. Jesus thought every human being worth dying for, so our prayer is mainly for other people, especially those of us who are suffering, who are needy, or who have turned their backs on God.
We Dominican parishioners, lay, religious, women or men, do not only pray for other people. Our prayer is focused on them because it is centred on seeing them through the loving eyes of God who died on the Cross for them. We know that we have been born into the world to share in Jesus’ mission to save the world. We might think we have a full-time job in trying to save ourselves, but we save ourselves by being part of Jesus’ project to save the world.
For us as Christians with a Dominican slant, our prayer and our active life in carrying out our vocation amount to the same thing. Both are about passing on Jesus’ invitation to the feast of eternal life. We do that by living the mystery of Jesus’ Incarnation – God becoming one of us and our becoming one with God, sharing the divine life of loving others.
The link word between our Dominican prayer and our active sharing the good news of the Gospel might be ‘compassion’. This is a key word in the way our Gospels describe the God we believe in. Compassion is our greatest need from God and each other, and we give it our own expression both in our prayer and our active lives together.
The Gospels give us a stunning example of compassion in the account of Jesus feeding a crowd with a few loaves and fishes. We are all familiar with the story. Jesus had spent most of the day with a large crowd of people who delight in listening to him and having their afflictions healed by his divine power. But towards evening Jesus tells his disciples that he and they need to provide food for the crowd before they begin their long journey back to their homes. The problem is that they have no food or money to buy it. However, a small boy offers Jesus a few bread rolls and some fish, presumably his family’s uneaten lunch. Despite one of the apostles’ belittling the offer, Jesus accepts it and uses it to feed and satisfy the whole crowd.
The importance of this incident for us is that we too, like the apostle in the story, can often feel that anything we can do to satisfy other people’s needs would be so negligible as to be futile. And, of course, this can be true of any help we could offer an individual, as well as anything we could do in the case of natural disasters or in times of war. But the Gospel story gives us a solution to this kind of situation. What we have to offer might indeed be very little. But if we hand it over to Jesus, as the small boy did, there is literally no limit to what he can achieve with it.
At this point we need to remember that after taking the loaves and fishes, Jesus blessed them, broke them, and distributed them to the crowd. To understand these ritual actions, we must remember that at the Last Supper Jesus did something similar with the bread and wine for the Eucharist which became his Body and Blood to feed his disciples and make them fit for eternal life.
The mentality which believes that Jesus’ blessing can transform the value of the gift we offer is at the heart of Dominican spirituality. Our prayer for others might seem of little value. Our contribution in terms of time, our skills or our money towards healing the suffering and satisfying the needs of a multitude of others might seem negligible, but if we hand over whatever we can into the hands of Jesus, there is literally no limit to what he can achieve with it. That is the all-important lesson one small boy in the Gospel has to teach us.
We believe that mentality has been alive and well in our parish for 100 years. That is what we are celebrating. Our community’s generosity to others is the great sign that God’s presence among us has been welcomed. We are not celebrating our own achievements, but what God has done for others through our prayers and our lives. As a Dominican parish that is in a special way our vocation from God.
We who have lived in St Dominic’s Parish are today celebrating the fact that this community, like so many others, has a history of generosity to those in need. Our prayers are offered for them, but so in a real sense are our lives, because we believe that it is basically for them that our lives are given to us.
Fr Thomas Cassidy, OP was the Prior Provincial of the Assumption Province from 2000-2008. Well before that, the young Tom and his family were parishioners of St Dominic’s. He is currently assigned to Our Lady of the Rosary Parish, Woodlands WA.
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