You shall love the Lord, your God,
and your neighbor as yourself.
Prayer for Vocations
August 25th, 2023
Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Matthew 22:34-40
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend on all the Law and the Prophets.”
Jesus is very skilled in answering the question of the doctor of the Law. The Law, by then, had become fulfillment, normative, that should help to live this sense of belonging to a people, to the chosen People of Israel. However, Jesus reveals with his answer that the new law is that of Love and not that of fulfillment: the Love of God, of feeling this love in our whole being: heart, soul and spirit. With this, Jesus affirms the integrity of the human being who is a whole and with that whole is invited to love God and others.
This invitation to love is no longer conditioned by sacrifices, prohibitions, a series of norms or rites that do not touch the heart. In return, it invites us to love and in the way we love there will no longer be sacrifices because when one truly loves, the sacrifice becomes a desire to give the best of one and only because one loves. When we love without seeking recognition, freely, including everyone and truly ALL, we are getting closer to discovering how Jesus loves.
We, Religious of the Sacred Heart, called to discover and manifest the Love of the Heart of Jesus wherever we are, this Gospel puts us back in this key: "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your spirit... and you shall love your neighbor as yourself."
Let us ask the Lord to help us to be women who love without reservation, that the love we have felt, felt and experienced in our own history may be manifested in our way of relating; to be a witness to what we once professed and promised since our consecration.
- Let us leave a moment of silence to welcome this Gospel and what it tells us today, what calls we feel, what it invites us to and then share.
- To conclude our community prayer, invite to name, if we know, women who are wondering about vocation:
- Lord, we entrust to you the life of.......... So that they can be faithful to their process of discernment and that they can respond generously to what you call them to live. Let us pray to the Lord.
- We pray for all rscj in the world. May it accompany our vocation and impel us always to live our consecration with joy and hope. Let us pray to the Lord.
Good Father, we pray for young people. May your enthusiasm, joy and vitality always be a sign of life. May they discover their vocation to love in the world and may they want to commit their lives to transforming the most wounded realities. Let us pray to the Lord.
Together, we ask the Lord's blessing, that every day he may renew in us this new commandment: to love God with all that we are and to love all peoples.
Jessie Muñoz Sepúlveda rscj
Province of Chile
