Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours;

Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion looks out on the world;

Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;

Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.

St Teresa of Avila

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Since the essence and nature of God is love and compassion, mission is the outpouring of God’s love and compassion to the world.

Mission is an attribute of a loving and compassionate God. Neither the Church, nor Catholic education, nor we individually, have a mission. The mission has us!

Our role is to be instruments of mission; to be the embodiment of divine goodness, love and compassion.

Our task in forming ourselves, to participate in mission, is to resolutely chip away whatever clouds our essential Divine nature. By removing what is petty and self-seeking, we can bring forth all that is glorious, loving and compassionate.

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The glory of God is seen in the human being fully alive.

St Irenaeus  

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By realising his human potential so fully, Jesus embodied the Divine so completely.

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Jesus was fully alive with the life of God, totally loving with the love of God, who possessed the capacity to be all that he could be and through these things, he revealed the very ground of being that we call God.

John Shelby Spong  

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In Jesus we have an undistorted picture as to who God is. The entire ministry of Jesus was rendering visibility, tangibility and concreteness to divine love. All those who came in contact with Jesus had a new experience of God.

Jesus had a vision for a world which arose from his heightened insight into the loving essence of God. He called his vision the ‘Reign of God’; the divine dream of salvation for all of humankind; God’s royal will, or value system being lived out.

To be collaborators in mission, we must align our priorities with those of Jesus and stand in solidarity with those who are blessed in the eyes of God: the peacemakers, the merciful, those who thirst for justice, as well as the poor, the powerless, the excluded, the marginalised, and the suffering.

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Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country or language or customs. Rather, we are told that they should be known by the way they live, by the way they reveal to the world the God of love and compassion enshrined in their hearts.

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The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere else.

Richard Rohr  

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We were created by love to love. When all is said and done, our life’s mission and purpose is simply to be the loving, compassionate and inclusive face of the Divine to all we meet.

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Shine through us, and be so in us, that every soul we come in contact with may feel your presence in our soul.

Let them look up and see no longer us but only the Divine!

Let us thus praise you in the way you love best, by shining on those around us.

Let us preach you without preaching, not by words but by our example…

Cardinal Newman  

 

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