Saturday, June 25

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime (pp. 131-132)

To read this morning's office, click here.

The Request for Presence this morning asks this: "In your righteousness, deliver and set me free." The Greeting continues this theme of freedom: "you have freed me from my bonds." Thomas, who is the subject of our Reading, finds that liberation when he sees the very wounds of Jesus. "This," our Refrain tells us, "is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes."

Our society is both enriched and confused by the notion of freedom. Our Constitution is the basis for most of our ideas about freedom, but the Christian sense of freedom is so much more. It makes these simple claims: We are God's, we are made in God's Image, and we can only be who were meant to be when we live out the Image God made us to be.

We don't have to be what others want us to be; we don't have to be what we'd like to be; we don't live the script others have written for us. We can only be what God made us to be: the Image of God. To be the Image of God means to embrace the God who made us and let God embrace us.

The most liberating or freeing idea that I have ever come across is this one: God made me to be me, that special me he made me to be, and I need only to be the person God made me to be.

This, too, is "marvelous in our eyes."