Beginning Day In New Jersey: Living the Real, Today and Every Day

Today our School of Community hosted New Jersey's first Beginning Day and it's beautiful to experience how the Holy Spirit is knitting us all together from various parts of the state. Often, we schlep into Manhattan or Staten Island or Brooklyn for CL events. That is fun in its own way, but it is also gratifying to know a life of our own is forming on this side of the Hudson. The School of Community in which I participate began as a group for college students, and has been an adult group for the past two or so years.

We held the day, which is a time for prayer, singing and reflection, at the Rutugers University Catholic Center. (I pulled this photo from its website; it doesn't show the snow everywhere today) We ended with a Mass celebrated by Father Jeff Calia, C.O. parochial vicar of the church next door, St. Peter the Apostle. More than a dozen adults, including three priests, gathered.

A big part of today was listening to Father Carron's video from the Beginning Day held in Italy a few weeks ago. He encourages us to "fix as presence the present things." This means we should strive to be more attentive to the reality around us, and to be attuned to the Presence that called all our reality into being. This is work.

It is easy for me to take things for granted: the sky above me, the children before me or the man with whom I share my life. The busier I become with work and family tasks, the less I consider that everything in front of me is a gift and that my life itself is a gift. Someone brought these people and these circumstances to me.

I need to begin each day understanding I don't do anything on my own. I don't create reality and I don't create my own accomplishments. I need to understand the source from which love and work spring not from my will, but from my responding to the will of the Presence, the creator of Reality. Living the real means embracing the life I have been given.

Today, with its snowy streets and crystalline sky, is a reminder.