One of the topics we picked for renewal, which because of my travels we=ve not been able to get at things we will start in January for sure, and that is the Office. It=s the central objective thing we do together as community and it=s really based on the profound wisdom of monasticism.

        Let me give you just one example so you get the point. Here=s a man who is married three times and now he=s in an apartment by himself with his two sons. For the first time in his life he realizes that his sons are a gift from God and that he can=t just run his life any way he wants and that he has to be subject to God. That took him some time to wake up. But it=s connected to his awareness to who God is.

        That can happen in many ways, the deepest would be beyond everything, beyond creation, and beyond redemption, just who God is. I hinted at that yesterday at the beginning of Mass that God is an infinite being and therefore just has infinite abysses in areas of his being that to us are totally strange and wild and completely unknown. They=re known to God, of course, but they=re abysses, they=re infinite zones. God can lead us into those areas and of course we would remain in mystery but we would have some idea of God=s infinite power and wisdom and strength and wildness and a few other things like how happy he really is. Now that would be for probably the deepest that God could lead us to in terms of deepening our faith and converting us intellectually.

        We have other levels that are also important and that is creation itself. It=s a realization of how big and how immense the universe is. One of the things the Pope has always done as leader in this community was to have all the physicists get together and talk about discoveries. It wasn=t just for the sake of just having a good discussion but he was really interested in how they saw creation as a manifestation of God=s power of beauty, etc., even though they may not have used that kind of language. He knew that when the human discourse gets sufficiently deep on any particular subject it deepens the human culture and opens us up to God more deeply.

        Creation is one such source that can make us appreciate God and that=s in the psalms in a number of ways. We can get kicked into the mode of praise from looking at the psalms from that angle. We see, like in the first psalm we prayed this evening, how God was really redeeming and guiding his people. We see the redemptive action of God and we see that what God has done in the past he continues in the present. We should be able to see the action of God in different things.

        Someone wrote a book called How to find God in the Evening News. That maybe a challenge, but take for example the fact that the Indians when they heard of the bombing in Oklahoma they traveled for miles to get there and to dig out the dead, even though they were in pain. They just did it spontaneously. There=s the manifestation that God has poured his Spirit into us. It=s the goodness of God manifested.

        We should be able to see not only through the psalms but even our own experience to have reason to praise, thank, petition, and adore and intercede as we run through our day and run into different things. Today is a day to rejoice and thank God that Gerard was able to get Mr. Terry Fergus to give $100,000.00 to the campaign. It=s a gift from God and we need to thank him for that. We can say other things too. Someone called the other day and I hesitated because it was a call to go to the hospital to anoint somebody and I wasn=t sure weather he was ready for it. So I started to pray and when I got there I found out that he really wasn=t ready. I came back Saturday and I received him back into the faith. Forty years away from the Lord. There it is, it=s God=s action. Mercy for this person. God was pursuing him all that time. No matter what other people said about him or what he did, God was pursuing him and made it possible for him to be reconciled. Right now he seems to be in a coma and I don=t know if he will come out of it.

        This is really a key question to our life. When we gather to praise and thank the Lord in the Mass and also in the Opus Dei because it=s the place where we do something that=s exceedingly true. God is worthy of all praise. Then we have another aspect to that, that is, we are the ones that make up for all those who don=t acknowledge God. You know as well as I do there are many such people. So we have a mission besides, an important mission, to give God the glory due his name.

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