Hear I am, Lord, I come to do your Will

When I was a little boy, my mother would get letters from her cousin Rosanne,  in Ireland, and she would show the letters to me. I noticed sprinkled through the letters were the letters, “DV”.  What’s “DV”mean, I asked my mother?

That means “God willing”,  my mother said. “Deo volente” I learned later in Latin. 

And so when Rosanne wrote “Mary is looking for a job in Glasgow, DV “ she meant “Mary is looking for a job in Glasgow. God willing may she get it.” “ We hope the weather get’s warmer for Danny’s graduation, DV”  meant “We hope we have good day for Danny’s graduation, if it’s God’s will. The letters “DV” were a filter putting her life into another perspective, the filter of God’s will.

You don’t see much of that perspective today. We tend to see life through the filter of politics, or economics, or psychology  or just plain chance. We need to see God’s will at work in our lives and in the world today.

What’s God’s will?  We pray in the Our Father, “Your will be done.” We believe God wills our good. God wants the best us. God calls us his friends, his children. We are children of God. That’s what we are. We haven’t seen it yet, but that’s what we are.

Pope Leo is reflecting on the Second Vatican Council in his Wednesday audiences this year, and last Wednesday he began reflecting on divine revelation. God revealing himself. God calls us friends, the pope says, quoting the words of Jesus to his disciples. 

 “No longer do I call you servants…but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:15).

But we are so unequal, how can we be friends of God. Our knowledge is so limited, how can we be friends with Someone whose wisdom is unlimited.  “We are not equal to God, but God himself makes us similar to Him” be sending his Son to us. “Friendship is born between equals, or makes them so”. (Pope Leo )

We can hear God speaking to us as friends, as children of God, in the scriptures we hear in our liturgy today. God speaks to us as Father. Our prayers remind us who we are. 

We were servants called by God to be something more, our first reading from Isaiah tells us. God calls us to a destiny far beyond our imagination and a mission higher than we  can ever see ourselves. We’re formed as servants in the womb,  but “It is too little, the LORD says, for you to be my servant…I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

In our gospel reading today, John the Baptist speaks of how he came to know Jesus in the baptism at the Jordan where the Holy Spirit made him known. And John was filled with joy.  (Jn 3:29).

Like John the Baptist, we are called to know Jesus as God’s Son through the waters and graces of baptism and the Holy Spirit given to us. We called to know him now in word and sacrament, and as we know him we rejoice. 

“Here am I, Lord, I come to do your will”  That prayer from the psalm in today’s liturgy, could we take it with us and say it this week? 

We need to pray to deepen our friendship with God. “Only when we speak with God can we speak about him”, Pope Leo said in Wednesday reflection. Only when we speak with God can we know ourselves and our dignity as God’s children..