In Integrity... He shall walk with you!

THE WORD IN LENT - 5th week, Wednesday

April 1, 2020: Daniel 3: 14-20,91-92,95; John 8: 31-42
Point for Dialogue #28: Private priorities and Public manifestations

'Truth will set you free', declares Jesus today. And if Jesus were to have been asked to define what he meant by Truth, he would have said, 'Truth is what is'... It's no mere philosophy, it is a Spirituality! Remain with that statement a little longer and reflect on it...

Truth is what is, and it never changes. No situation, no circumstance, no crisis will ever change it; if they manage to change it, it had never been the Truth. Compromises, justifications, manipulations, adjustments, conveniences and inconveniences... these considerations at times, drive us away from truth and we experience a sort of split life, split between what we profess and what we practice, between what we believe and how we behave, between what we say and what we are! 

Hence the Word today underlines an essential dialogue that has to take place between the image of myself that I wish to give others and the real me that I nurture within me; a dialogue between my unseen private priorities and my public functional manifestations.

The absence of that split is called Integrity. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, were persons of Integrity and no one doubted them on that. Neither were they ready to give up their identity. And they found God walking beside; it was cool in the furnace. In the midst of the crisis we are living through these days, if only we wish to sense the Lord walking beside us, we need to grow in our personal integrity - giving up on the gap between what we say and what we do, what we believe and how we behave. 

Let us heed the call of the Liturgy today...to heal ourselves of all splits that we may learn to live in integrity of life, an integrity that would set us free. In integrity, the Lord shall walk beside us, all our life.