Reflections on the Gospel Reading for the Day
Loving one another can start with a smile.
“Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk 12:29-31).
How do we actually live out this great commandment given to us by Jesus? How do we love God that we cannot see?
Our first step is to understand better the love that Jesus is talking about. St Thomas Aquinas teaches us that to love, is to will the good of the other. This is more than an emotion, mere sentiment, or a feeling. To love means to accompany, encourage, and be present to one another. The love that God offers us is unconditional, it is about service and sacrifice.
Jesus doesn’t just want us to maintain the Church, our family, our friends, or our ourselves, he has always called us to be a missionary Church, to go out from ourselves and love others as he loves us. The greatest joy of God is that his creation, his human beings are fully alive!
Many inside and outside of the Church have been wounded, yet her heartbeat is strong, because the lifeblood that flows through her veins comes from her Son, Jesus the Christ. So many of our brothers and sisters are walking away from the Church, but her children still hunger to be loved and to love, they still hunger to belong, to be a part of who God has created them to be. They have a curiosity and desire to learn and they want to know, to have their questions answered, and to find meaning and fulfillment.
If we are to be of help, we start by saying yes to the invitation of Jesus to receive the love of his Father. We are to kneel in his presence, sit at his feet, and allow the transforming love of the Holy Spirit to conform and shape us, to sculpt us in love. At the same time, we are called to learn and know our faith, recognizing that our belief is grounded in both faith and reason, so that we can share who we are as a child of God, and share what we have learned with others, with love, with joy, even in the midst of scandal and crisis. This is not a time to run away, but to stand up for what we believe in, to show, through our own life and commitment, that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
Jesus Christ is the center of the Church. He is present in the Word proclaimed, in his Body and his Blood that we receive, in the Sacraments, and he is present in each and every one of us. If we are struggling to see or experience God, the best way to begin is to reach out toward another in love.
We are brothers and sisters in Jesus. We hunger and crave to belong to God and one another, whether we are aware of this hunger and thirst consciously or unconsciously, and this is true for the atheist as well as the mystic alike. Jesus invites us to be his disciples and we do so by loving God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and by loving our neighbor as ourself.
Being a disciple of Jesus is about surrendering ourselves to the love of God, receiving, embracing and being shaped by his loving hands. We are then to share his love and joy with others through invitation, hospitality, welcome; meeting our brothers and sisters where they are, as they are, with understanding, convicting when necessary although never condemning, being patient, and present. “Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired” (St. Mother Teresa).
God loves us more than we can ever mess up. God helps us to see and know that we are not defined by our worst choices or mistakes. God loves us more than we can ever imagine. When we make the time to breathe deeply and slowly, we can receive, rest, and abide in his love. Allowing ourselves to be loved by God allows us to begin again and again.
Each person that we meet today, we will then have something to share; the love we have received. Not sure how or where to start? The easiest way I learned from Mother Teresa is that when you catch the eye of another, share a smile. In that very simple act, we say to another you matter to me, you have dignity, worth, value, you are important, and I love you.
Photo: St. Mother Teresa not only loved through her smile, but in her words and actions. We can be like her not by doing great things, but little things with great love.
Link for the Mass readings for Sunday, November 3, 2024
“Everyone who seeks the Son and believes in him may have eternal life.”
“For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who seeks the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day” (Jn 6:40).
This is our hope and what we believe, that we who encounter Jesus and believe in him shall have eternal life. God’s will, what he created all of us for, is to be in communion with him and one another in this life and the next. A word of assurance that I often lean on is from the book of Wisdom from our first reading today, “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us utter destruction. But they are in peace” (Wisdom 3:1-3).
The miracle of Jesus raising the daughter of the Roman official, Jairus, embodies these verses from Wisdom. As Jesus entered the home of the official many were “making a commotion” and Jesus dismissed them stating: “Go away! the girl is not dead but sleeping.” He was ridiculed by the crowd but paid them no heed. He went to the girl, took her hand, “and the little girl arose” (cf. Mt 9:18-26).
Jesus assured his followers as he assures us today that the will of his Father is that all will be saved. Experiences like the raising of Jairus’ daughter, the son of the widow from Nain, and Lazarus, were not only seeds of hope planting the promise of his resurrection to come but a foretaste of the raising of humanity on the last day. His disciples witnessed Jesus’ actions and words, and not only kept these experiences in their hearts but shared them.
Through the Gospels we are able to enter into and experience the encounters Jesus experienced with others again and again. We also experience Jesus each time we pray, participate in the sacraments, communal worship, and in our willingness to love one another. In each of these moments, we are conformed and shaped into who we have been created and called by God to be in this life and the next.
This All Souls Day we celebrate the gift that Jesus was victorious over sin and death, not only for himself but for all of us. Unlike those he raised from the dead and died again: “We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power over him” (Romans 6:9). The difference between All Saints yesterday, and the commemoration of all souls today, is that we pray for those who have died still in need of the purifying fire of God’s love. Just as “gold in the furnace” (Wisdom 3:6) is purified, so God purifies those in purgatory. Let us pray for them today that they may be freed from any stain of sin so to also join the communion of Saints!
“Merciful Father, hear our prayers and console us. As we renew our faith in your Son, whom you raised from the dead, strengthen our hope that all our departed brothers and sisters will share in his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever” (Prayer for All Souls, from the Liturgy of the Hours).
Photo: Rosary walk a few weeks back, Riverside Park, Vero Beach, FL.
Link for the Mass readings for Saturday, November 2, 2024
May we, like the saints, take the hand of Jesus and Mary and allow them to lead us through this life and into the next.
“Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Mt 5:4).
From a theological reference point, we might suggest that Jesus shared these words from the perspective of the eschatological event, his second coming at the end of time. We can rely on the hope that Jesus died for us all and we will rise with him on the last day. The saints are those who will rise with him.
This is certainly our hope and for those of our loved ones who have died, our hope is that this is true. I also believe that Jesus was also speaking about our day to day experiences as well. Jesus said, as is recorded in Mark 1:15, “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.” Jesus, is the kingdom at hand, just an outstretched arm away. Those of us who mourn will be blessed, will find comfort when we resist running away, or denying the agony and pain that threatens to overwhelm us and instead allow ourselves to experience the grief and the suffering of our loss. It is in the very embracing of our pain and suffering that we come to encounter Jesus with his arms wide open.
By experiencing the depth of our sorrow and allowing ourselves to grieve and mourn in the loving embrace of Jesus, we can release this unbearable weight and begin to heal. If we ask God or anyone near us why someone dies we may not receive a sufficient answer. His Son though, who suffered the agony, loss, pain, and hurt as we do, understands what we are feeling. His presence and closeness will be the strength we need to guide us through the many ups and downs, fits and starts, of our emotional roller coaster. Just like having a surgical amputation, our life will never be the same, but we will heal and be able to live again.
On this solemnity of the Communion of All Saints, we celebrate all those for whom we believe are now in heaven. This observance began with the holy martyrs who were willing to give their lives for Jesus. There are also those saints throughout the ages who witnessed their faith openly, lived their lives courageously, and to the full. Both have gone before us to the true land of promise, our heavenly home. There are also those unnamed saints who day in and day out quietly lived their faith.
They are all now where we one day seek to be and from there they cheer us on, encourage, and intercede for us that we will one day be with them! The saints are our inspiration, guides, and untiring support. We, like the saints, need not fear death because through our life in Jesus, death no longer has any power over us. Yes, we mourn the loss of those who are no longer with us in this reality, yet we also rejoice in their new life in Christ.
This is the tension. Let us not run from but enter into our pain, grief, and sorrow. Let us allow ourselves to mourn so that we may experience God’s comfort, peace, healing, and yes, even blessing and happiness that will come. At the same time, let us remember and celebrate the lives of those we hold close to our hearts and have gone before us. The veil between heaven and earth is very thin, especially during the Mass where Jesus is made present again. This is the time of fulfillment, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Let us reach out our hands to Jesus and Mary, each of them who daily said, “Yes.” to the Father, and allow them to lead us to repentance and a holy life that will ultimately lead us to heaven to enjoy eternity with all the saints!
Photo: JoAnn shared that she was just changing her address. May it now be 144 All Saints Way, Heaven!
Link for the Mass readings for Friday, November 1, 2024
Saying, “Yes.” to the will of God helps our little faith to increase.
Some Pharisees came to Jesus and said, “Go away, leave this area because Herod wants to kill you” (Lk 13:31).
Even with this warning, from some Pharisees no less, Jesus continued to teach openly and publicly as well as performed healings and cast out demons. He did not fear the threat of retribution even from the likes of Herod who had killed John the Baptist. He willingly surrendered all to his Father.
The courage of Jesus makes him a very dangerous man because he cannot be controlled, threatened, or coerced. Jesus is sure of what God has sent him to do and he is going to follow through with his Father’s plan even to the point of giving his life.
Many, even those who didn’t believe like the centurion who ran his spear through his side, admired his courage, coming to believe that he was the Messiah (cf. Mark 16:39). Many of the first-century martyrs who followed Jesus to their own deaths were a big reason for those who came to believe and also became followers of this One who died on a Cross. Tertullian, one of the early Church Fathers, living from 155 – 220 AD, went so far as to say that “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
We are all called by God to be martyrs, not necessarily by shedding our blood. Martyr literally means witness. Each one of us is called by Jesus to bear witness to what we believe. Faith is a gift. If we feel that we are weak in our faith, we are in good company, because Jesus said on more than one occasion to his Apostles, the ones he would send out as his witnesses, “Oh, you of little faith.”
The Apostles continued with the little faith they had. They trusted in Jesus and continued to move forward. If we feel like our faith could use a little shoring up, let us not choose the path of Judas who isolated himself from the forgiveness of God. Let us instead ask God to increase our faith, to allow the Holy Spirit to dwell within us and transform us, and be open to opportunities to be more understanding, kind, and patient with ourselves and each other.
Jesus, please help us to be still and hear the Father calling us, challenging us, to resist indifference and be his witnesses in our everyday lives and to be more open with each stirring of the Holy Spirit to be better witnesses. Each time we say yes to the will of God, our faith increases.
Photo: Mary’s, “Yes.” opened the way for our, “Yes.” Praying in front of an icon of Mary in the chapel at Bethany Retreat Center, in Lutz, FL while on my canonical retreat this time last year.
Link for the Mass readings for Thursday, October 30, 2024
Love is the narrow gate that we enter to grow closer to Jesus and one another.
He answered them, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough” (Lk 13:24).
Jesus offered this answer to the person who asked him, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” Jesus’ parables about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven (cf Mt 19:24) and the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31) also reveal to us that what we say and do in our lives regarding the welfare of others matter. Are we building walls or bridges regarding our relationship with God and one another, are we including or excluding?
There are many distractions, diversions, and temptations that pull at us. When we give in to them, we can strain or even break our relationships. Jesus said many will not be strong enough, and on our own he is right. St Paul also realized this, for he wrote, “I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil that I do not want” (Romans 7:19). How many of us could say the same?
Relationships are not easy in the best of circumstances, this is true on the human level as well as the spiritual. St Teresa of Avila, the 16th-century Spanish saint and doctor of the Church, shared openly and honestly with Jesus once after being thrown from a carriage into a mud puddle, “If you treat your friends so poorly, it is no wonder that you have so few!” I relate to the honesty of this quote. My maternal grandparents had the same kind of open, unfiltered relationship with each other. To an outsider looking in, they would have missed the depth of love they had developed for one another for over sixty years and which continued to grow into their last days.
Authentic relationships demand that we go through the narrow gate of love. Love is more than mere sentiment, emotions, or feelings. We must grow in our willingness to sacrifice, be committed, understanding and forgiving, present, patient, willing to risk being vulnerable, honest, to respect boundaries, and share who we truly are with one another, free of any pretense or masks. On our own, we are not strong enough to persevere, but with God, we will remain faithful.
My grandmother told me to take the time we needed to get to know each other, but once we knew, not to wait too long. We didn’t. JoAnn and I were married six months after we started dating. Each of us brought our own baggage, wounds, and made plenty of mistakes, to our relationship, yet each year was better than the one before because we remained committed to God and to each other. We became more patient and understanding, we empowered and were there for each other. At each of the crossroads that arose over our twenty-three years, we chose the narrow gate. We loved Jesus and each other and that made all the difference.
Jesus is the relationship we need to develop first and foremost and he will then help us to properly order our relationships as well as all aspects of our lives. He will be our foundation and strength as challenges arise. Jesus continually invites us with his tender chords of love to draw closer into relationship with him so better to grow closer into relationship with one another.
Photo: Jesus at the center of our relationship may all the difference.
Link for the Mass readings for Wednesday, October 30, 2024
A little awareness and an act of kindness can make a huge difference.
In today’s Gospel from Luke, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed and yeast. Each of these elements is not only small but they are tiny. Though with the proper environment, resources of sustenance, water, and sunlight, this seed will germinate, sprout, and grow into a large bush. Yeast, a single-celled organism, is the catalyst for assisting dough to rise, strengthen, and ferment, thus providing a more appealing and tasty bread.
Jesus offered these simple examples from everyday agrarian life that his listeners understood from experience. If we have planted seeds or made our own homemade bread, we too are in a better position to relate to these two small parables as well.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus lives out the parables by engaging person to person. Jesus’ interactions happened concretely, through walking along the road and breaking of bread together, sharing stories, teaching, healing, and exorcising demons with his touch, and he still does so today. The smallest, genuine act of kindness or love can seem insignificant and may even go unnoticed by many, but it is significant to the individual who is on the receiving end and can reveal dramatic results over time.
There is a story that expresses this point called, “A Simple Gesture” from the story collection, Chicken Soup for the Soul. The short tale describes how one day a boy named Mark was walking home from school and came upon another boy who had tripped and dropped all of his books and many other items. Mark offered to help carry some of the load of the other boy, who, as they walked home, found out was named Bill. They talked about common interests and when they approached Bill’s home, Bill invited Mark in for a Coke and to watch some T.V. They spent the afternoon together, then interacted on occasion for the rest of their time in middle school and into their high school years.
Three weeks before their graduation, Bill asked Mark if they could talk. Bill shared that the reason that he had been carrying all of that stuff home on the day they had first met was because he didn’t want to leave a mess for anyone else to clean up. Bill had planned to commit suicide that evening. Bill continued to share that, after their original encounter and afternoon together, he realized that if he had killed himself that day he would have missed more opportunities to talk and laugh. Bill finished the conversation by saying, “So you see, Mark, when you picked up my books that day, you did a lot more. You saved my life” (Canfield and Hansen, 35-36).
Personal encounters were how Jesus helped others to realize that the Kingdom of God was at hand. Just as in the example of how Mark, in making the simple effort to help Bill pick up his personal items, helped to shift the momentum away from a potential suicide attempt. This action shows how Jesus can continue to work through us today.
Like a modern-day Good Samaritan parable, “A Simple Gesture”, helps us to see that when we are aware of and engage in opportunities to help and act with genuine care, no matter how small, we can have a dramatic effect on another’s life. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.
Many people have a lot on their plate, we may not be aware of even half of what they are going through. That is why we need to be attentive and open to the move of the Holy Spirit in our lives. He will lead us out beyond ourselves so that we notice others. In doing so, we can become like the mustard seed, or the yeast, in another’s life. Through a smile, a hello, a bent ear to listen, we can make a connection and then offer a simple act of kindness. What may appear to be minuscule or mundane at the moment, may, in fact, be life-changing and transforming for a lifetime.
Photo: My seminarian brothers helped me to get my nose out of the books to enjoy a Marlins game back in April of ’23.
Canfield, Jack, and Mark Victor Hansen. Chicken Soup for the Soul: 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1993.
Link for the Mass readings for Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Jesus “spent the night in prayer.” Can we give God ten minutes a day?
Jesus went up to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God (Lk 6:12).
Jesus spent the whole night in prayer to God. What is prayer? All of us as human beings seek for meaning and to belong. We desire security and stability, as well as direction and adventure. We want to be accepted, to be loved, to love, and to experience meaningful relationships. These primary yearnings are present within us. Often though we confuse what we truly desire for temptations that ultimately leave us unsatisfied and more importantly ignore what will truly fulfill us: developing a relationship with God through prayer.
If you want to pray, you have already begun. The desire in and of itself to pray is prayer. The danger of reading about prayer is that we think we are praying. In the turning of a page or the completion of a chapter, we feel as if we are accomplishing something, but we are only imagining how prayer can be. “It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of the imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you” (Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners, 12).
There is a myriad of ways to pray and each practice will match each of our unique personalities and temperaments. The key to prayer is to make a commitment to a time and a place to pray each day and then show up at that time and place to pray. Start with a timeframe, such as five minutes that you know you can do. Depending on the discipline of prayer you practice, your family, school, work, and/or ministerial demands will be indicators as to how much you might be able to increase the time you pray once you have built a consistent practice.
The amount of time that we dedicate to prayer is not as important as the commitment to pray each day. We need to set in our daily schedule our non-negotiables for prayer first and build around that. Again, this will depend on our station in life. Young parents’ non-negotiables are their infant whereas someone who is retired will possibly have some more time.
Mass, the liturgy of the Hours, reading the Bible, sitting or walking quietly outside, at the morning table with a favorite devotional, the Rosary, Chaplet of Divine Mercy, spiritual reading, and all with a healthy sprinkling of silent meditation and contemplation are all practices that can help us to grow in our relationship with God.
St Therese of Lisieux offers us a good approach to prayer: “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy” (CCC, 2559). No matter how we pray, our goal is that we don’t seek to bend God’s will to our’s but to allow our lives to be conformed to Jesus, that we encounter and build a relationship with him and each other, such that our experience of prayer matches St Augustine’s: “True, whole prayer is nothing but love” (Foster, 1).
Photo: One of my favorite daily practices, Rosary night walk!
Foster, Richard J. Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home. NY: HarperCollins, 1992.
Kreeft, Peter. Prayer for Beginners. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000.
Link for the Mass readings for Monday, October 28, 2024
Let us choose to walk out of the darkness and into the light of Jesus.
Wars continue to rage on, violence continues to be a steady diet, division, demonization, and polarization doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. What gets lost in the headlines of all this is the real people, human beings, family members, friends, classmates and colleagues. No wonder feelings of anxiety and stress are escalating exponentially. How are we to respond? In the Gospel today Jesus sheds some light on the darkness that beleaguers not only our country but our world.
On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.” And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. (Mk 10:47-48).
Though Bartimaeus is blind, he seems to “see” better than those around him and know who Jesus is. He does not just call out the name of Jesus, but “Jesus, son of David.” This is not merely a genetic marker, but a Messianic title. Bartimaeus may have physical blindness, but he is one of the few in the Gospel of Mark to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. The disciples and the crowd walking with him, the many who “rebuked him”, showed their spiritual blindness, in that they prevented the blind man from coming to Jesus.
Where might we see ourselves in this scriptural account, who are we? Are we like those in the crowd who follow and identify with Jesus, yet rebuke others seeking to come to Jesus? Do we foster a posture of a fear of the other, embrace tribalism, nationalism, and contribute to and foster division, polarization, and prejudice? If we do, we then are suffering from the very spiritual blindness that Jesus has come to heal.
We can better help to bring about change by making an assessment of ourselves. Each thought we ponder and action we take ripples out from us and touches everyone. In what way do we contribute to the violence? Do we gossip, spread false reports knowingly about others only to degrade and belittle? Do we pass dehumanizing images and memes on social media? Do we talk over or at people, do we impose our views not even willing to listen to another? The smallest act of indignity shown to another, whether it be a snide remark, a racial, ethnic, or sexist epithet, or any manner of disrespect contributes to the darkness that seeks to blind us.
There is another way. There is another path we can walk upon. The one that Bartimaeus, once he could see, walked upon. To walk it, we need to be willing to allow Jesus to light the way, to convict us in the depths of our souls. In so doing, we are better able to counter the impulse to build walls that promote division, hate, and violence, and instead build bridges of forgiveness, unity, and love. We can then reflect his light in our present darkness.
Jesus did not rebuke Bartimaeus for causing a ruckus and calling out to him. Jesus called Bartimaeus to him. Jesus came close to others cast aside as well. He saw and sees each person as human beings, brothers and sisters created in the image and likeness of God. Jesus called the Apostles and Bartimaeus to him. We too are called to Jesus, called to be present to those within our realm of influence to be more understanding, and to meet each other with compassion and empathy. Darkness only spreads when we contribute to it and become the darkness. It dissipates when we remain in the light of Jesus. Hate only wins if we feed hate. Love wins when we are willing to forgive and love each other.
Let us have the humility to recognize our interconnectedness, that we cannot get through this life on our own. We, like Bartimaeus, need to be healed and made new. We need the Son of David in our lives, we need a savior, a healer, and we need each other. When we acknowledge this reality, we may better be able to resist the temptation to be indifferent to or dehumanize others. Instead let’s be more willing to notice, recognize, pray for and act to provide aide for each other. Jesus calls us to arise from our defensive posture and to open our arms wide to love, to will the good of each other as other.
Jesus asked Bartimaus, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.” Let that be our request of Jesus as well. May we ask Jesus to help us to see with the eyes of love, the eyes illumined by his light, and the wisdom of his Father. May we be willing to see each other as God sees us, as his beloved daughters and sons.
Photo: Night Rosary walk in Riverside Park, Vero Beach, FL.
Link to the Mass readings for Sunday, October 27, 2024
Spiritual Stepping Stones 