Co-Laboring

A Grace for this Week:

To live and to work willingly as the hands and feet, heads and hearts, of the risen Lord living and working today in us.

Co-laboring

Co-laboring is our post-Resurrection call.  Jesus did not come into our world and simply set it right.  We need only look around us to see that.  Rather, Jesus set right humanity’s relationship with God and gave us a template for setting right our personal relationships with God, with one another—in our families and in our communities big and small—and with the rest of creation.  The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are one way of engaging the call.

St. Ignatius concludes the Exercises with a meditation on the love of God.  This meditation draws together the fruits of the entire prayer experience—from gratitude through repentance and healing; through the encounter with Jesus Christ, his teachings and his own example of following the Father’s call to live in such radical solidarity with the world that he willingly sacrificed his life for its redemption; all the way through to the final unfolding of the Paschal Mystery in the new life of the Resurrection.  The meditation invites us to consider all the graces God has granted us in the course of the Exercises and to place them at his service.

As Jesus freed his friend Lazarus from the bonds of death, so he desires to free us from the fears, resentments, and misguided convictions that bind us to our sinfulness so that we might be more effective co-laborers of the Risen Christ in the building up of the Kingdom of God.  On Calvary Jesus breathed forth his forgiving Spirit into his new Body—us.  It is here that our co-laboring begins.  We are the Christian community that is called, commissioned, and sent to carry on the mission of Christ in our world today.  It is for the New Body of Christ, born under the Cross, to carry out the mission of “breathing forth” into others the forgiving Spirit of reconciliation, unity, and peace that Jesus “breathed forth” into us.  Our mission is to enable Christ, by our “yes” to his call, to carry on his mission in and through us today.  And we co-labor accurately with his call by practicing the same prayerful discernment of the Father’s will that Jesus practiced in his ministry.

The experiences of the earliest Christian community, as related in the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of St. Paul, reveal the discerning choices the first Christians made as they took up the responsibility of continuing Christ’s mission and nurturing the Body of Christ on earth.  That early community faced persecution and death.  Rather than intimidating them, the perils inspired them to creative vitality, expansion, and diversification.  It was clearly a death-resurrection experience for the early Church.  And it is a template for bringing renewed, even more vibrant, life out of the disappointments and failures we encounter as individuals and communities.

The Church has always faced challenges from without and within.  The sign that we are being true to our Christian call is not the absence of difficulties but the forgiving and loving way with which we address our difficulties.  As St. Paul exhorted the Ephesians:

[D]o not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption.  Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.  Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Eph.4:30-5:2)

May the Easter season imbue us all with the new life Christ has opened up for us and may we respond with joyful hearts, discerning minds, and willing hands and feet.  Alleluia!

–Adapted by Christine Szczepanowski from A Year of Prayer Guide Book produced by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus (2005)

Prayer for the Week:

Suscipe (Take and Receive)
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory,
my understanding, and my entire will—
all that I have and call my own.
You have given it all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace.
That is enough for me.

—St. Ignatius Loyola