Collect, Saturday of the Second Week of Easter:
“O God, who willed that through the paschal mysteries the gates of mercy should stand open for your faithful, look upon us and have mercy, that as we follow, by your gift, the way you desire for us, so may we never stray from the paths of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.”
Gospel Alleluia for Tuesday of the second week of the Easter Season:
In these holy days, we continue to beg the Lord for the deep joy of His Risen Presence, in astonishment and gratitude for the gift of Himself—He who is “the life of our lives,” and the source of every blessing—and in the midst of our own sufferings, especially in the wounds unjustly inflicted upon us. Even if those wounds “remain” as hindrances to us, they also open us up to following Jesus in the works of mercy, in loving and forgiving our “enemies.”
As we have already noted in these reflections, it is the Crucified Jesus who rises, with His open wounds transfigured forever in His glorified body as signs of His endless and inexhaustible forgiveness.
In His new life, we are drawn into the love of the Father in the Holy Spirit. As partakers of the Divine life, children of the Father, brothers and sisters of Jesus, renewed ever more profoundly by the gift of the Spirit, we will be healed by His mercy and given the capacity to “see” our neighbors in a new way—the way God sees them. In the light of God’s merciful love, we will no longer want to cling to our divisions and conflicts, our resentment, our grudges and our injuries and the weapons we use to inflict them. Instead we will find in God’s love the power to forgive one another.
