Dear Brothers and Sisters,

We have read from Deuteronomy, and here are some reflections on it.

“The Lord fell in love with you, out of his love” according to Deut, 7, 6.  Those people were not the most powerful nor the most numerous of the known world.  He needed no argument to justify His preference and choice.  God loves because he loves. God creates love.  For He knows he can break the jar, reconstruct it, beautify it.  God is like the master who has abundance of wisdom to teach his people and counteract their ignorance and raise their level of wisdom, by osmosis almost, by the action of the Holy Spirit.  God through Jesus Christ loved his people.   Did he not cry before his death, on contemplating the temple of Jerusalem., symbol of His identity? He wept mainly for the city but also for all the nations of the earth to which Redemption would reach eventually.

But at the same time as He expressed this declaration of love, he lifted up the people by means of it. Yes, I know that that primitive and crude people would not appreciate His choice and would prostitute itself with idols, but at least someone would understand and be grateful.

God acts like any man in love, so He can gain the interest of His children. We have seen hundreds of times in gardens, written on the larger tree trunks, two initials inside a heart pierced by an arrow.  Who could measure the passionate tension with which these letters, arrows and hearts were carved?  Within them were placed a whole life, a dream, a being in love, who after saying it in burning words, was not satisfied and went on to carve it, to sculpt it to leave it exposed to everyone´s gaze.  A boy or a girl wrote that love of theirs in blood.

These days we are experiencing a real “kairos”, a time of grace. It is a gift to fall in love with Jesus Christ and Saint Dominic, for this changes our lives. To see so many saints, men and women who lived their lives completely devoted to Jesus Christ and His Church.

This is our vocation my friends: to fall crazily in love with Jesus Christ so we can transmit this love and the joy of being followers of Jesus.

But how can we fall in love crazily with the Lord?  We ask ourselves…There is a Spanish expression which says:  Contact creates love. This is what we must do with the Lord.  A Dominican man or woman should be a person of prayer.  Our preaching must emerge out of that contemplation. Our Christian life, in imitation of Dominic our father and master, grows in a heart to heart contact with the Lord, as Teresa of Jesus tells us.

We must get the strength of prayer to back up our preaching, so as to convince people with our way of life.  Paul VI said we need more witnesses nowadays than teachers. The witness is one who has seen and experienced and then speaks of that.

The best way to get to know Jesus is through his mother. Our Mother, our Lady of the Rosary.  Our pope, John Paul II said in the meeting with youth held in 2003 in Cuatro Vientos, Madrid:  to know Christ you have to enter the school of Mary.

This school is the school of humility and simplicity.  Our Lady draws us closed to the Lord and teaches us to say like her: Yes.  And we are here today because once our parents said yes when they baptized us. 

And through various stages of our lives we went on saying yes.  We are here today because once we said Yes when we were presented with the idea of being Christians according to the Dominican way.

Society thinks we are crazy to be Catholics and more so if we have a commitment such as ours.  But I give you an invitation, brothers and sisters.  MAKE THIS WORLD A MADHOUSE.

MAY GOD WHO IS LOVE, WHO IS FATHER, AND MARY THE STAR OF EVANGELIZATION AND SAINT DOMINIC OUR MASTER OF PREACHING, BLESS US