Fr Jarek Kurek OSB
Gathered as the community of the church here this morning, we resemble the community of the early church, described for us in the Acts of the Apostles. By coming together, we are devoting ourselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Today, on the eight day after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, we celebrate once more our symbolic regeneration. For this reason, therefore, it is for us to assume the attitude of a newborn child, to take a fresh look at our spiritual life and with new eyes reshape the quality of our life of faith.
We began this Mass by chanting a text from the Letter of St Peter: ‘Like newborn infants, you must long for the pure, spiritual milk, that in him you may grow to salvation’.
Nowadays, there is an overwhelming choice of milk on the shelves of our supermarkets. But St Peter tells us who are Christian that there is only one, true, life-giving milk, which is the Word of God and that Word remains for ever. It is for us to rekindle within a longing for this spiritual nourishment, our source of life in God.
The milk we were talking about has, as we sang in Latin, a rationabile character about it. That is to say, this milk is the divine Word of God and its ingredients are God’s inner thoughts. These words and thoughts cannot be perceived by just anyone, it requires a finely tuned ear to notice them.
How can we truly hear and discern these life-giving words and thoughts? When someone plays a two-note chord on a violin, everyone hears the sound of these two notes, but only the person with a very well trained ear will hear the hidden third note, which is not played, but which creates the most amazing harmony within the sound. To hear this note is a skill, but without it, there is always something beautiful missing from the chord. The divine spark is missing.
The same dynamic occurs when we listen to the Word of God. A well-trained ear will hear what is hidden, hardly audible and so subtle. A well-trained ear allows us to recover our inner seeing and our inner hearing. This recovery can be summed up as the ‘salvation of one’s soul’.
St Peter tells us to use the power of the mind, our inner faculties. That is to say, while we are here on earth we don’t see Jesus, the Word of God, with our eyes, but we can still see him with the eyes of our minds by learning how to listen to his words whenever they are read to us in scripture, our spiritual milk.
On this day of resurrection, as we become newborn once more, we can make a fresh start together. Today is the day we grow to salvation. Don’t be afraid to assume the condition of a newborn infant in your soul. Let the ear of your heart long for this divine milk. Let us look for it fervently and in due course delight in the wonderful harmony of the divine words and thoughts, so that we will come at last to the salvation of our souls.