This morning I began my day by reading a 2001 article by Ron Rolheiser OMI titled: “Finding God in Community”.  In it he wrote:  “God is a flow of relationships to be experienced in community, family, parish, friendship, and hospitality. When we live inside of these relationships, God lives inside of us and we live inside of God. Scripture assures us that we abide in God whenever we stay inside of family, community, parish, friendship, hospitality – and, yes, even when we fall in love.”

I think of the many relationships that I have experienced in my life, not all of them life-giving or healthy, not all of them bad or what some would term as ‘failures’.  It has been through all of these relationships that I have come to know myself, and yes to recognize God.  Not anything I have done or initiated on my own – always, always with others.

“God is a trinity, a flow of relationships among persons. If this is true, and scripture assures us that it is, then the realities of dealing with each other in community, at the dinner-table, over a bottle of wine or an argument, not to mention the simple giving and receiving of hospitality are not a pure, secular experiences but the stuff of church, the place where the life of God flows through us.”  I have often said that I come to know myself, to know who I am in the eyes of God only through looking and loving others.  And it is through others that I come to know love.

Humbling, but strangely comforting as well.  In a couple of hours I will go out to join with my parish community to celebrate the Eucharist.  I quietly wonder ‘who or what do others see when they look at me’?