I think there is more to say about the passage from our Constitutions that I posted yesterday - here is the part I did not really reflect on in yesterday's blog and yet it is very much a part of our spirituality:

Our starting point is the Gospel
with all that it demands from us of love, forgiveness
and justice,
and of solidarity with those who are poor
and rejected by the world.

Jesus told us to love as He has loved us; we are to love with His love as we can do nothing without Him and He calls us to take a stand for justice always. This may just mean doing the little things we see if our daily lives. Jesus sought out the poor, the outcasts, those who were in need of His love. We need to be His hands and feet and voice in our world today.
My Dad never missed Sunday Mass but he also did not talk much about religion. I remember that I was in high school and in one week I had three different people tell me things that made me realize how my Dad lived the Gospel. The first person was a black woman who came to clean and cook for us sometimes and I happened to meet her when going to wait for the bus to take me back to boarding school on Monday morning. She told me that she had been waiting in line to pay her bill at the downtown Laclede Gas and Light Company and my Dad had come by and seen her and insisted on taking care of her bill so she did not need to wait there. She was so grateful as she had a long way to go and might have missed her bus; then I met a man who worked with my Dad and who told me how he was standing up for all the men in this section of the company so they could have a union for all the employees and he was showing a great deal of courage as the head of the company was not in favor of allowing the union. My Dad even accepted to be treasurer for this new union. The third came from our yard man who just mentioned to me how much he respected my Dad because of the way he would ask him so politely if he could do something. Old Tom told me that most just ordered him around and wanted everything done at once but my Dad was "a gentleman and always so considerate when asking for something to be done." I remember seeing my Dad in a new light after three testimonies in one week; in fact, I began to realize that my parents lived the Gospel even if they did not talk about it. Well, I do not know what brought all that out of me today, but I was thinking of the ways we practice justice in daily life.