I have been wrestling these past couple of weeks. In my prayer journal, I’ve scribbled page after page of prayers, thoughts and questions about things that have been hard and things I don’t understand. I have wondered, in my prayer scribbles, about God’s mercy for me, about the temporal consequences of sin and about his will, among other things.

It has been a time of deep honesty and closeness with the Lord (see Rachel’s beautiful devotion from last week’s first Scrutiny Gospel). It has been exhausting, too, because alongside the heart-to-hearts with Jesus, I have also been trying to figure it all out. 

Mother Teresa said, “Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus—a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.” And his kiss is the sweetest. Even as the horror of the crucifixion unfolds. He invites me to be with him there. To open my own sufferings to him. In the nakedness is total trust. In the agony is redemptive power. In his death my belovedness is sealed. And in the resurrection my joy is complete.

Then you shall be radiant at what you see, your heart shall throb and overflow…Those words leapt off the page of the missal and they actually hurt as they landed in my heart.  They felt like a promise that was for me somehow, but also so impossibly inaccessible from where I sat alone in the pew on that cold day in January at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver.

Our Lord Jesus Christ is the King of the Universe. How striking it is that the church gives us this solemnity on the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we begin our season of waiting upon his birth in the poor manger. He is the King of the Universe. The universe! The immeasurably vast universe which holds all life, all light, all matter, all energy, all sound. He is its creator, sustainer and king. It all obeys him. "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty."