A group of about twenty people were privileged to spend an Advent Saturday reflecting on the Word of God, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on Divine Revelation with Spiritan priest, Fr Eamonn Mulcahy CSSp.
Fr Eamonn gave us an engaging and frequently entertaining introduction to the context of the Second Vatican Council and the centrality of the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum to the whole process. He focussed our prayer on words from the opening paragraph of the Constitution “so that by hearing the message of salvation the whole world may believe, by believing it may hope, and by hoping it may love.”
He went on to reflect on our relationship with Christ, the one source of Revelation, not in terms of concepts and ideas, but as the living Word of God in person, so that, in the words of the First Letter of St John we may share “what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have watched and touched with our own hands, about the Word of life.”
He spoke about the centrality and importance of the kernel of Tradition surrounded by the husk of changing traditions and the necessity not to confuse the two.
He brought us right up to the present day in reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented to us by the recently introduced ESV Lectionary that we will encounter at Mass, encouraging us to make sure that we have our own copy of the Bible at home in whatever translation we find helpful and encounter the living God through a prayerful reading of its pages.
The day concluded with the Celebration of Mass where we truly experienced the same Christ present in the Table of the Word and the Table of the Eucharist. We were sent forth to joyfully share the hope we had experienced together.
