Saints and Souls: Held in the Embrace of Infinite Love (John 6:37–40)

“Whoever comes to me, I will never cast out.” (John 6:37)

In these few words, Jesus reveals the heart of God, a heart that never excludes, never withholds, and never gives up on anyone. God’s love is not based on merit but on mercy. Whether saint or sinner, all are drawn into this vast embrace of compassion. The same love that formed the saints also transforms sinners, as it did St. Augustine, who moved from restless wandering to deep belonging. Richard Rohr reminds us that All Saints and All Souls are not two separate celebrations but two movements of the same divine embrace. The saints reveal what God’s grace can make of us, while the souls remind us of our shared humanity, our unfinished journey. The saints show us the light of transformation; the souls remind us that the journey continues through mercy. Both live within the circle of God’s endless compassion. 

Jesus’ words today dissolve every boundary we create between worthy and unworthy, holy and sinful, alive and departed. In God’s heart, there is only belonging. Rohr says that “God holds everything together in love, even our failures and wounds.” When we allow ourselves to be held by this love, forgiveness ceases to be an event and becomes a way of seeing.

For those of us who are in the agony of losing our loved ones, let us remember that they are not gone, but have gone ahead into the fullness of God’s embrace. We are one with them in the mystery of love and life. As Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “When we touch one thing with deep awareness, we touch everything.” When we touch the love of God, we touch the communion of saints and souls, those who walked before us and on whose shoulders we stand. Love connects what death cannot divide. 

All Saints and All Souls invite us to stand humbly in this truth: that holiness is participation in divine love. We are all being gathered by the Father, shaped by mercy, and raised to life in Christ. So today, as we remember those who have gone before us, radiant saints and struggling souls alike, we hear again Jesus’ promise: “This is the will of my Father… that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me.” In that promise lies our hope: no one is lost, no one is cast out, all are held eternally in Love.

 - Lilly Pushpam PBVM

When Being Right Becomes Our Blindness (Luke 18:9–14 )

This parable speaks of the greatest virtue, humility. Yet what often keeps us from being humble is not open pride but the quiet trust we place in our own righteousness. Luke begins by saying that Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and looked down on others. Those words already hold the message.

 We too often trust ourselves to be right. We do it gently, even unconsciously, wrapped in good intentions. We find comfort in our discipline, our prayer, our ministry, our sacrifices. And without realizing it, we begin to compare, not always out loud but in the small, silent corners of the heart. To make ourselves right, we make others wrong. It happens in very subtle ways in our personal, family, and community life when we long for our ideas to be accepted and feel hurt when they are not, when we notice another’s weakness and quietly reassure ourselves that we would never act that way, when correction becomes more of a habit than an act of compassion, or when we speak of another’s mistake to confirm our own sincerity. Sometimes it slips in when we assume that our way of prayer or service is somehow purer or more faithful, or when our conversations focus on who is wrong rather than what is wrong.

These movements of the heart are not great faults, but they slowly close us to grace. Self-righteousness often appears as strength, yet it weakens our capacity to receive mercy. It makes us certain instead of open, confident instead of humble. Jesus gives us a tender and vulnerable image in the tax collector standing far off, unable even to raise his eyes. There is no defense, no comparison, no need to justify himself, only the raw truth of being seen. And that is enough. Grace meets him there.

I often find that truth in my own journey. The words that matter most are not the many I speak, but the ones that rise from a life that tries, however imperfectly, to live what it says. The Pharisee compared himself with others; the tax collector compared himself with truth. The only comparison that leads to growth is with who I was yesterday and who I am becoming under God’s gaze today.

 -        Lilly Pushpam PBVM

It is God who Knocks (Luke 18:1–8)

We often read this story as a call to keep asking until God listens. But what if it is not, we who are the ones knocking? What if it is God? God keeps coming to hearts that have grown tired, to lives layered with disappointment and self-protection. He does not demand or force His way in. He simply stands and knocks, waiting for the faint sound of a heart beginning to open.

Paula D’Arcy once shared about a time of deep loss in her life. She said that for months she begged God for answers and heard only silence. But one morning, sitting in the stillness of her grief, she felt these words rise within her: “I was here all along, waiting for you to stop asking for light, so you could finally see Me in the dark.”

That is the kind of waiting this parable reveals. God waits with sacred patience, a waiting that holds space for us to return. He knows how easily we become deaf to love, how we grow indifferent to pain, how fear builds its walls around us. Yet, like the widow, God does not walk away. He stands at the threshold of our being, knocking softly through moments of grace. The unjust judge, cold and unmoved, mirrors the places within us that have forgotten how to care, the corners of our hearts that have closed themselves to tenderness, to wonder, to another’s pain. And the widow, small, nameless, and relentless, is the Spirit of God within us, pleading gently for awakening.

 On this World Mission Sunday, we are invited to listen to that sacred knocking —to let God’s patience shape the rhythm of our hearts. Mission is born from this silence, from the stillness that teaches us how to see and how to love. When we allow ourselves to be found by God’s waiting, our lives become the message —a quiet witness of presence, a wordless act of hope, a light that does not shout but simply shines.

When Jesus asks, “Will the Son of Man find faith on earth? “Perhaps He is asking something more tender: Will we recognize the quiet patience of God who still waits at our door? Will we let His silence become the space where love is born again?

 - Lilly Pushpam PBVM.

The Grace of Turning Back (Luke 17:11–19)

Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem, passing through the region between Samaria and Galilee. It was a liminal space — a place that belonged fully to neither side, a threshold between what was familiar and what was unknown. Such moments in life are sacred. They hold the quiet potential for change, where we are invited to let go, to trust, and to be transformed.

It was there, in that liminal space, that ten lepers met Jesus. They stood apart, their bodies marked by disease and their hearts burdened by rejection. They had been pushed to the edges, made invisible by society. Their leprosy was more than an illness; it carried the weight of being forgotten and unloved. They stood at a distance, cut off from touch and community. The only part of them that could still reach another human being was their cry. And that cry reached Jesus. He saw them not their disease, not their distance, but their dignity. He did not touch them or question them. He simply said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And they went — still wounded, still waiting, yet trusting His word. Healing came as they walked.

That simple act of seeing becomes an encounter of grace. The distance between them becomes a meeting ground of healing and dignity. I am reminded of a story from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Jean Valjean, after years in prison, is turned away by everyone he meets. Hungry and hopeless, he knocks at the door of a bishop who welcomes him without hesitation. Valjean steals the bishop’s silver, is caught by the police, and brought back in shame. But instead of condemning him, the bishop says the silver was a gift and offers him two candlesticks as well. and says, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. I have bought your soul for God. “That moment of unexpected mercy restores something deeper than freedom   it restores his humanity.

All ten lepers are healed, yet only one returns. He is a Samaritan, doubly marginalized — yet his heart recognizes what the others miss. His turning back marks a paradigm shift: healing is not complete until it becomes gratitude. Gratitude bridges the distance between gift and giver, between humanity and God. When the Samaritan returns, he crosses another threshold from healing to wholeness, from exclusion to communion. In that moment, Jesus not only restores his body but lifts him to full dignity, saying, “Your faith has made you well. "To turn back, to remember, to give thanks — this is the quiet movement of faith. In that returning, we discover that wholeness has always been waiting within us.

  - Lilly Pushpam PBVM

Faith that Carries us (Luke 17:5-10)

 

I often find myself saying, “I did it.” A small kindness, a prayer whispered, a task completed, and I take the credit as if faith were mine to own. Yet the Gospel unsettles me: the servant says, “We have only done what we ought to do.” And suddenly I see that faith is not my achievement. It is God’s grace moving quietly through me. We know the mustard seed. Tiny, almost invisible, yet whole. It dares to fall, to be buried in darkness, to disappear where no one sees. And in that surrender, life begins. Faith too is never passive. It acts, it trusts, it serves, not waiting for comfort or certainty but alive, daring, moving.

 We witness the same in the life of St. Francis of Assisi whose feast we celebrated on the 4th of October. He gave up security, wealth and pride not to prove himself but to let God’s life breathe through him. His faith became action, touching lepers, praising creation, rebuilding what was broken. He did not say, “I did it,” but let every act speak of grace. And we see it too in our migrant brothers and sisters. With no roof above their heads, no familiar land beneath their feet, no promise of tomorrow, they keep walking. Their hearts ache with loss, yet they embrace the unknown with unconditional trust. They show us that faith is not convenience but surrender, not possession but grace in action. 

I am reminded of a story of a tightrope walker who amazed the crowd by carrying heavy weights across a rope stretched above a waterfall. The people clapped, convinced he could do anything. Then he asked, “Do you believe I can carry someone across in this wheelbarrow?” They shouted, “Yes, we believe!” But when he asked who would sit inside, silence fell. Faith is not applauding from a safe distance. It is daring to trust, to step in, to let ourselves be carried.

So perhaps this Gospel invites us to stop clutching at ownership, to stop saying, “I did it” and to let faith be what it truly is: a gift that acts through us, a seed that grows in surrender, a grace that carries us forward. For when we allow faith to be grace in motion, even the smallest seed can move mountains and even the most fragile heart can carry the weight of hope. 

 

   -  Lilly Pushpam PBVM