Imago Dei - Our real core

WORD 2day: Tuesday, 5th week in Ordinary time

February 11, 2025 - Genesis 1: 20 - 2:4a; Mark 7: 1-13

Jesus had one thing that he could never bear or tolerate! Living two lives... how much ever good I may do, it does not matter as much as, I being good. This is because Jesus is mindful of the real core of our being: Imago Dei, the image of God that is enshrined within us.

God saw everything was good as God created them one by one. But when God had created the human beings, God found it very good - the recorded Word says. Because God saw Godself in the human person. The inner core of our being is that godliness that we can observe in God. When we refuse to see it within us or reject what is at the core of our selves, we become aliens to ourselves. This is what Jesus is warning us against. Get closer and closer to the real core of your being: the image of God. 

This is the true Christian spirituality, that the Word today wants us to understand. Spirituality itself is a sense of being connected to everything and everybody... and further still, Christ's, Christ-like and Christian Spirituality is a sense of feeling an obligation to love people, fend for their good, be interested in their well being and spend oneself for the happiness and well being of the other. It cannot be merely a dry or rigid performance of rituals and lifeless hypocritical obedience to rules and commandments. 

Christ's spirituality consists predominantly of love: because God is love and that is the image that is placed at the core of our beings. We are called to recognise the presence of this image within us, marvel at its majesty and strive to live true to it, come what may: troubles, inconveniences, burdens, sacrifices and carrying of crosses! If we are prepared, we are well on our way to become what we really are, in our real core - the living images of God.

To touch and to be healed...

WORD 2day: Monday, 5th week in Ordinary time

February 10, 2025: Genesis 1: 1-19; Mark 6: 53-56

It did not matter whether they touched the Lord or the Lord touched them, they were healed. Both ways it is an act of faith: to touch the Lord and to allow the Lord to touch us! 'Speak Lord, but a word and my soul shall be healed,' we pray! A word, a touch, a glimpse or a gaze, a whisper... that is all that it takes for us to receive the fullness, from the hands of the Lord who has made us and continues to guard and protect us.

We begin from today to listen to and reflect on the book of genesis. What marvellous accounts as the basis of our faith experience! God reigns... God holds everything in being... God manifests God's glory and might in everything. When God said a word it was done. And when Jesus came, it was enough people touched him, mighty things happened. There was a spiritual connect between the people and the Lord. That spiritual connect is what we call faith, the experience of faith.

All that we need to know is to understand that we are handiworks of the Master Creator, and live our lives according to the mind of the One who has loved us into existence, with a well defined purpose and an eternal plan. How prepared are we to allow the Lord to touch us? How eager are we to touch the Lord with all sincerity of heart? Because, when the Lord touches, nothing remains the same; they change, they transform, they are recreated! 

All those who touched him were cured; and all those whom he touched were healed! Let us seek his touch this day.