Dear Friends in Christ,
There is a lovely Jewish proverb which captures, as only proverbs can, something so true about love: ‘Love thy neighbour, even when he plays the trombone.’ 
Imagine that neighbour playing his old trombone late into the evening – it would truly be hard to have very warm feelings for him, let alone love him, wouldn’t it? Love, rather like forgiveness, is a great idea until we really have to dig deep and love.
GK Chesterton said: ‘We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.’ The problem is – and it really is a problem – that, for the Christian, love isn’t an option or a fanciful idea we can take or leave: it’s a command. Jesus says so very clearly: ‘This is my command: Love each other’. And if this weren’t hard enough, the pinnacle of love, its very height and essence, isn’t half-heartedly tolerating people, putting up with them or bearing with them, it’s laying down your life for them. This is the kind of ‘greater’ love we are called to. Jesus said: ‘Greater love has no one than this; to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’
This is so challenging, so utterly beyond us, do difficult and frankly impossible that if we truly understood the call to love, we would throw up our hands in despair, sigh deeply and say, ‘This is impossible.’ Nevertheless, if we were open to the Holy Spirit we would hear him say to us: ‘What is impossible for you, for man, is possible with God.’
For perhaps the key to understanding love, the self-sacrificing agape love of the gospel, which is prepared to love your enemy, who just happens to also be your neighbour, is that we can’t love like this without God’s grace and power. Perhaps we only truly begin to love when we reach the end of ourselves and recognise our complete inability to love in a self-sacrificing, giving-our-lives-for- others kind of way.
‘Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ, vere latitat – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory himself, is truly hidden.’ (C.S. Lewis)
The idea or notion remaining in Christ is about practising the presence of God. We tend to think that professional religious people – months, religious sisters, the clergy – find it easier to ‘remain’ in Christ than we do. Their vocation obliges them to say the Daily Office and to cultivate an active prayer life. However, lay people are called to do the same. We may not say the Divine Office (although many do), but we can certainly practice the presence of God during our day.
God isn’t shocked by our weakness but rather assures us that when we are weak, then we are strong. We remain in God’s presence through taking simple steps, little gestures, and easy movements. Pray during the day today, ‘Lord have mercy on me a sinner.’ Or, ‘Lord, send forth you Spirit and renew the face of the dearth.’ These simple prayers over time, if we persevere, will allow us to live and abide in God’s presence during the day 
Jesus tells us in the Gospels that we must pray to the Lord of the harvest to send labourers into his harvest. The old adage states: ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get’! For us as Catholic Christians, our asking is our prayer, and if we don’t pray, then how do we expect the Lord to respond with provision of priests and religious. 
In Animal Farm by George Orwell the sheep are easily led, in contrast to the pigs (very intelligent animals by all accounts) who are leaders. Sheep aren’t known for being especially intelligent – they wander, they stray, they graze all day, oh and they smell – but they are endearing, especially the baby lambs, and they provide us with wool and meat. 
of creation. Never before or since, has anyone triumphed over death & sin, and these facts are fundamental to our Catholic Christian faith!
When people actually really understand what their faith is all about, it really does help the individual to deepen their commitment. Having a wishy-washy attitude to the practice of faith doesn’t help anyone. Knowledge and understanding are the key to ingredients to having a lively faith and a commitment to Christ. 
As fascinating as this would be as a theme for our reflection today, our focus is going to be elsewhere. Our focus is on how, despite appearing to his disciples, despite the hard physical evidence, Jesus nevertheless ‘opened their minds so that they could understand the Scriptures.’
So there we have it; if we want the resurrection of Jesus to take root in our lives, if we want to experience God’s transforming us by the renewing of our minds; then we need to read the Bible, asking the Holy Spirit to warm our hearts and bring its truth alive. 
In the Life of faith, there is much that we will never fully understand completely, but the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, and showed himself to his disciples and many hundreds of others, is a testament to the power of God, and evokes faith as a response!
One hand was raised in blessing; the other was touching the garment at the breast. From the opening of the garment at the breast there came two large rays, one red and the other pale. In silence I gazed intently at the Lord; my soul was overwhelmed with fear, but also with great joy. After a while Jesus said to me, “paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the inscription: ‘Jesus, I trust in you.’”
Pope Francis has made God’s mercy almost a motif of his pontificate. He has transformed the noun ‘mercy’ into a verb, explaining that by receiving God’s love, we are ‘mercyed’, and in showing God’s mercy to others, we mercy. ‘Mercy’, then, is our watchword. Are we merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful? 
The following words from Pope Benedict provide us with food for thought: ‘We could regard the resurrection as something akin to a radical evolutionary leap, in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence. Indeed, matter itself is remoulded into a new type of reality. The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal.’ In Jesus of Nazareth, God-made-man, the God-man, a new humanity was revealed, a new creation. This message turned the world of the first century upside down, and it can do so again in the twenty-first century if we will take courage and proclaim it.