god

A prayerful pause can make a big difference.

“I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart” (Romans 9:2). Paul is sharing his great pain because his own people are rejecting the gospel of Jesus. Paul can certainly relate because he not only rejected but persecuted anyone who followed Jesus, the person he came to believe is truly the Messiah.

Jesus also experiences the same aguish as he is meeting yet again opposition as he heals a man with dropsy, a condition in which some part of his body was suffering with swelling. Instead of recognizing and rejoicing in the healing just witnessed, the people judge Jesus for healing on the sabbath.

In response, Jesus points out the obvious by asking, “Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern, would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day” (Luke 14:5)? No answer but crickets… Jesus, as he often does, builds his case from the lesser to the greater. Just as he did with the parable of the unjust judge who made a just verdict, and an unwilling neighbor gave bread to his persistent friend in the middle of the night, how much more will God provide for his children? He wants all of us to be saved. The healings of Jesus are invitations to the ultimate healing we all seek which is the restoration and reconciliation of our relationship with God.

We need to be careful that we don’t fall into the tunnel vision of some of the scribes and the Pharisees by limiting Jesus in our own lives because we are choosing our fears, insecurities, or doubts over his guidance. I have done both. I have resisted, chosen not to act, beaten myself up over it (which does not work because we are still focused on ourselves and not Jesus), and prayed to improve the next time. I have followed without hesitation. I have also hesitated and then acted. Each time I was willing to risk and follow Jesus, I have experienced his consolation and our relationship has grown stronger.

I invite you to listen to Jesus today and ponder where he might be leading you and in what way to act regarding yourself or another who may be in need of healing. Grant yourself a quiet moment to examine where you may be resisting his invitation no matter how small, trust him, and take the risk to love. With each thought we entertain, choice we make, word we speak, may each go through the filter of the Holy Sprit. Ask, God is this what you want me to think, choose, or say? If yes, go forward. Instead of a knee-jerk reaction, let us give ourselves a prayerful pause with the Lord.

Photo: There are some great views we receive when we stop and look up with a prayerful pause!

Link for the Mass readings for Friday, October 31, 2025

God increase our faith.

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 and would continue to do so, especially not being deterred from continuing his march toward Jerusalem.

It is interesting that there are those Pharisees that are attempting to help him. Could they have been moved by the courage of Jesus? His undeterred persistence for his mission and courage makes him a very dangerous man. 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 like the centurion, who did not believe in him, after he ran his spear through his side, admired his courage, and something happened in that moment such that he came 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 and the One who we believe in. 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. It is in growing our relationship with Jesus that gives us our strength. 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 Jesus. 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 follow his will.

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 to follow the stirring of the Holy Spirit and put his guidance into action. Each time we say yes to the will of God, our clarity, courage, and faith increase.

Photo: We can have confidence that when we turn to the Holy Spirit, he will guide us through any storm.

Link for the Mass readings for Thursday, October 30, 2025

We enter the narrow gate by growing in love.

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 sentiments, emotions, or feelings. We must grow in our willingness to sacrifice, be committed, understanding and forgiving, to be present, patient, willing to risk being vulnerable, honest, 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, often our insecurities seek to keep us unbalanced, but with God, we will remain faithful and grounded.

Regarding marriage, 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, into 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. 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. That means other people and things will not be able to remain. This is good news, because that which will not remain is not for our good. Growing in our relationship with Jesus takes time and commitment, and doing so will help us to properly order our other relationships as well as all aspects of our lives. Our Father is our foundation and strength and the Holy Spirit is our guide. God continually invites us with his tender chords of love to draw closer into relationship with him and so to better grow closer in relationship with one another.

Photo: Because our relationship and commitment with Jesus grew, so did our relationship and commitment with one other.

Link for the Mass readings for Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Jesus went up to the mountain to pray, we can join him.

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 did that look like? We don’t know. Since the traditional practices of prayer we have learned from Jesus we can speculate that he spent some time in vocal prayer, speaking with his Father. He most likely then spent some time in quiet meditation. But my feeling is that he spent much of his time in contemplation. A deep, intimate communion between him, his Father, and a deep experience of the love between them the Holy Spirit.

We can surmise vocal prayer because when the Apostles asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he taught them the words of the Our Father. He would have also spent some time in dialogue with his Father because when he came down in the morning, he “chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles” (Luke 6:13). Jesus would have meditated, thought about his choices of who he would have picked, and then prayed, dialogued with his Father for his confirmation. That he spent time in contemplation we can speculate because he knew the Father and the Father knew him. You don’t know someone intimately unless you spend time together.

How about us? Are these forms of prayer possible? Yes. If you want to pray, you have already begun. The desire in and of itself to pray is prayer. The originator of our prayer does not begin with us but is an invitation from God to spend time together. As the desire arises, we are now acknowledging God’s invitation. He will, if we allow him to get through all the noise, distractions, diversions, and temptations leading us away from praying with him, get through.

When we want to learn about something, our first instinct is to read and study about it. A good first step. The danger though regarding reading about prayer is that we think we are praying. In the turning of a page, the completion of a chapter, even reading the Bible, we can 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).

The other trap is when we are praying words, reading the Bible, being present at Mass, but only doing these practices. We don’t do prayer, we speak, meditate, pray, and listen to a Person. We allow God to do, through us. Is God an idea or a real Person? This is a very important distinction. When we pray even the Sign of the Cross, when done properly, we invoke each Person of the Holy Trinity: the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. When we pray in this way, we invite God to be with us and in us!

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, show up at that time and place, then 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 our commitment to spend time with God each day. We need to schedule daily 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 imagining ourselves sitting with Jesus on the mountaintop in silent meditation and contemplation are all practices that can help us to grow in our relationship with God. When the Holy Spirit invites us to close our eyes and be still though, is our invitation to listen to God and begin to learn his language of silence.

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). We pray, so we can fall in love with God who made us for himself.

Photo: Heading now to spend some time with Jesus on the mountain praying with our Father. Please join us!

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 Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Acknowledging our sins is the antidote to our pride.

“…whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk 18:14).

From the Christian perspective, humility is not false modesty. Where someone thanks us for doing something and we say something like, “Oh, it was nothing.” This response is often a conditioned response that, consciously or unconsciously, is given to elicit more praise and to keep the focus on ourselves and what we have done. “Sure it was something, you did all that work…” The more appropriate response would be, “You are welcome.” Then the topic of conversation can move on to other matters.

Humility has to do with our primary focus. Are we focused first and foremost on ourselves and placing the focus and energy in boosting our ego, jockeying for a position that is front and center? Or are we focused first and foremost on establishing that God is the core and foundation of our every thought, word, and deed and we are thankful to him for each breath we take?

We are nothing without God. Without him, we would cease to exist. We may bristle at such statements because our cultural influences often promote that what we have and achieved has come because of our own hard work and merit. There is some truth to the effort and energy we may have expended to achieve what we have, but if we think back, many others also had a part to play in where we are today, including God.

From a heightened sense of self-exaltation, we also tend to have less empathy or mercy for those who may have less or are struggling financially, emotionally, psychologically, morally, or spiritually. We might look down our nose at others thinking or saying outright, “What is wrong with them and why don’t they get their act together?”

Where in point of fact, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Situations in life, whether we are up or down, can change quickly. The point Jesus is making clear in today’s Gospel is that we are far from how perfect we think we are. We are all sinners and fall short of the glory of God. Recognizing this reality is a good place to be, as Jesus points out. Being willing to recognize our sinfulness is the first step to freedom.

The contrite tax collector “went home justified” because he came to terms with his sinfulness and confessed it so he could be forgiven, healed, and restored by God. The Pharisee who felt he needed no help because he “was not like the rest of humanity” closed himself off from the healing balm and reconciliation that he truly needed. His prayer was actually to himself and not to God. He did not see himself as a sinner, because of his own pride and arrogance, and so cut himself off from the love and mercy of God.

Our spiritual life does not begin to mature until we utter the prayer of the tax collector. “O God, be merciful to me a sinner”. If we don’t believe we need God, we keep ourselves at a distance. Until we acknowledge our dependence upon God and allow his light to shine in us to reveal our sins, we are in danger. Our own self sufficiency and reliance skews the view that we are sinners and are in need of forgiveness. “The antidote to pride is the total abandonment to the mercy of God and total trust in his grace to empower us to turn from sin and live charity” (Bergsma, 263).

Photo credit: The light of Jesus shines in our darkness when we are willing to receive him.

Link for the Mass readings for Sunday, October 26, 2025

Bergsma, John. The Word of the Lord: Reflections on the Sunday Mass Readings for Year C. Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2024.

Jesus invites us to repent so to “experience a radical reorientation of our whole life”.

In today’s Gospel, we read about two accounts of horrific deaths. The first is at the hands of Pontius Pilate, who has not only ordered the execution of Jesus’ fellow Galileans but had their blood mixed with “the blood of their sacrifices.” In the second incident, Jesus brought up the tragic accident in which eighteen people died “when the tower of Siloam fell on them.” 

In both cases, Jesus rejected the common notion of the time that these incidents were caused by God’s punishment and focused instead on the importance of repentance. Jesus stated quite emphatically: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did” (cf. Lk 13:1-5)!

Jesus consistently proclaimed repentance in the hope of helping his followers understand the purpose of his coming. Jesus provided meaning and fulfillment in this life as well as being the way to the truth of eternal life in the next. Yet, to experience the benefits of his invitation, people needed to repent from their focus on self, misunderstandings of God, and the false substitutions, and disordered affections that the world offered by having a change of heart and mind and turning back to God, the very source of their being. This is just as true for us today.

To repent and surrender to Jesus is not some submissive bowing to a tyrant but an acceptance of the aid offered by the divine gardener. Our repentance gives permission for Jesus to cultivate the ground of our being to rid us of that which sickens us and instead allow him to fertilize us with his word and grace in such a way that we are renewed. Jesus tends to our growth such that we can be more aligned with the will of his Father and the love of the Holy Spirit. When we repent and confess, we are forgiven, healed, and begin to mature so that we will bear fruit that will last.

To repent is a good thing. As is written in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, line 1431: “Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with our whole heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed. At the same time, it entails the desire and resolution to change one’s life, with hope in God’s mercy and trust in the help of his grace.”

When Jesus shared in his first public message: “Repent and believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15), he invited then and invites us today to a new way of seeing, hearing, experiencing, and living our lives. We all sin and fall short of the glory of God. As we turn back to Jesus and open our hearts and minds to him, he reveals with his loving light that which is preventing us from experiencing the love of God more deeply and growing in our relationship with him more intimately.

Photo: Quiet time to experience a holy hour with Jesus. Being still is a way to repent, to turn back to Jesus, and away from the distractions. In his presence then, we can allow our mind to quiet, and we can rest in him.

Link for the Mass readings for Saturday, October 26, 2025

God is always present, are we aware?

“You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky; why do you not know how to interpret the present time” (Lk 12:56).

Reading this verse brought two memories from my childhood. The first one is from when my friend Steve and I as kids were interested in reading the natural signs and weather patterns, and we enjoyed watching our local weatherman, Hilton Kaderli, forecasting the weather each night. Another memory was with my cousin Danny. We were at my Uncle Pierre and Aunt Claudette’s house one afternoon and we saw a storm rising. We headed to the road and started running as fast as we could in the opposite direction to see how far we could get before the storm caught us, and when it did we walked home, sucking in air, being pelted by the rain, and enjoyed a good soaking. Steve, Danny, and I read the signs of the earth and the sky, but we didn’t pay all that much attention to the things of the spirit at that time.

Not only through his teachings, but also through his public actions, Jesus revealed some powerful signs that God was in their midst. Jesus taught and preached on his own authority, he cast out demons, forgave sins, healed people, met and ate with sinners and women. These were amazing signs that the Messiah came to dwell among them, yet some did not or would not see this truth. They rationalized away that he could not be who he showed himself to be.

Some did see and believe in his and each successive generation. Some two thousand years later because of their faithfulness, Jesus speaks to us again today. The accounts and encounters of Jesus have been preserved and passed on. the Bible is not just a dead letter, nor is the sacred deposit of our faith tradition some inanimate object passed on blindly generation after generation. We are invited time and again to be aware, to look for how Jesus still works in our lives each day.

Nor is Jesus a mere historical figure. Jesus conquered death, rose again and became the first born of the new creation. He is present in his glorified Body in the Eucharist and through each of us, “for what you do to the least of these, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:31-46). The good news is that he invites us to read the signs of his presence in our lives in our times.

Do we see coincidences or God-incidences? Do we see God’s presence working in our lives? If not, could it be because our lives are so busy and fast-paced? If so, schedule some time each day to stop, breathe, and reflect. Even if for only five to ten minutes, we can slow down and ask God to help us review the past twenty-four hours with the express purpose of noticing how he has been involved and engaged in our lives.

It is often by reflecting and looking back over the course of a day, a week, or a month, that we will recall some God-incidents no matter how small. Being thankful for this growing awareness and asking God for greater insight each day will help us to grow in our awareness of how much he has been accompanying us all along in our daily experiences.

For those times that we have refused or failed to recognize this closeness to Jesus, especially in his presence coming to us through others seeking our help, we can ask for forgiveness and for Jesus to assist us in being more aware and more intentional in following the stirring of the Holy Spirit going forward. Opening our hearts and minds to God will help us to better read the signs that the kingdom of heaven is indeed at hand, in our very midst. Do we have eyes to see and ears to hear: his word, his presence in the Eucharist, in each other, in creation, and in the silence of hearts?

Photo: God reveals himself to us each day in so many ways. Just one for me coming home early Wednesday evening.

Link for the Mass readings for Friday, October 24, 2025

May we allow ourselves to be ablaze with the transforming love of God.

Jesus said to his disciples: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing” (Lk 12:49)!

What has been burned does not remain the same. What fire touches, it transforms. Jesus wants us to be consumed so as to be transformed by the fire of the Holy Spirit. Encountering Jesus affects a change in us. When we are open to allow the Holy Spirit to breathe on the embers in the depths of our souls they are fanned like tinder and ignite. We continue to fuel the fire by getting in touch with what God has called us to do in our place and in our time.

We are not to be a Christian in name alone but in thought, word, and deed. Pope Francis, in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, wrote: “THE JOY OF THE GOSPEL fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept this offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness, and loneliness” (Francis 2013, 9). Joy is a gift, a holy flame, that is given to us by the Holy Spirit, it wells up within, and rises up and out to be shared with others. It is different than pleasure which has its source in the stimulation of the senses being aroused but fades once the external stimulus has ended.

Happiness is also external and fleeting. It lasts longer than pleasure in that the memory of the experience will linger but it too will fade away. Joy wells up from within, as it is imparted to us by God and can be present even when the external experiences are stressful or chaotic. I experienced this when I was still teaching 5th and 6th Grade Religion and acting as the dean of students at Rosarian Academy. At the same time, I was also immersed in family and parish life, as well as my studies and formation activities for the permanent diaconate.

One particular morning I woke up exhausted. When the alarm went off my first response was to skip my morning prayer and hit the snooze button to get an extra twenty minutes before rising. Instead, I literally crawled to my small chapel area, lit the candles, and opened my breviary. When I read the words in Psalm 42: “Hope in God; I will praise him still, my savior and my God”, something ignited within. I felt an energy well up within me that I cannot to this day describe. I felt an inexpressible joy. Not only did the experience carry me into the day but lasted throughout the whole week.

God is the foundation of our lives and our Father seeks to transform us with the fire of his love. Even when we are at our lowest, with only the smoldering embers of our faith, we need to resist the temptation to feed indifference, desolation, and/or despair. When we turn to and trust in Jesus, he offers a way when there seems no way. Begin with a breath, be thankful for what we do have, even if it isn’t much. We can be thankful for God’s love and presence even when we don’t feel it. Keep showing up to pray, even if sometimes we have to crawl to get there, and the Holy Spirit will fan the embers within our soul to set us ablaze.

May we, “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19). To know the love of Jesus is more than knowing about him. We don’t read and study the Bible as we study a history text. We meditate, ponder, and pray with Sacred Scripture daily, to encounter a Person, Jesus Christ the Son of the living God. In doing so, the Holy Spirit will also enkindle in us the fire of his love and moments of consolation that we can experience regardless of our external or internal struggles.

Nothing else in this world can satisfy us as much as experiencing and being transformed by the love of our Father! When we seek God first, the attachments to finite things will begin to loosen. When we trust Jesus and align our will with his, we will come to know him and experience his love and that can be enough. We will no longer seek substitutes to place before God and can begin to let go of anything that is not of his will. When the fire the Holy Spirit burns only that which is pure will remain.

Photo: “Holiness is standing in the fire of self knowledge and letting it burn.” – Fr. Wayne Sattler

Pope Francis. Evangelii Gaudium: The Joy of the Gospel. Frederick, MD: The Word Among Us Press, 2013.

Link for the Mass readings for Thursday, October 23, 2025

The saints reflected the light of Jesus in the darkness, we are to do the same!

“That servant who knew his master’s will but did not make preparations nor act in accord with his will shall be beaten severely” (Lk 12:47).

Jesus, as did the prophets, spoke in ways that can be jarring. The purpose was to shake his listeners out of a dull stupor and to make clear his point. In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus addressed Peter’s question: “Lord, is this parable meant for us or for everyone” (Lk 12:41)? Jesus was most likely speaking to Peter and the Twelve. They are the ones he entrusted with continuing his mission. And just as he had been clear to point out those Pharisees who had abused their positions, he was being just as clear with Peter and the apostles.

Jesus wanted to make sure that his successors were not to continue on with business as usual and going through the motions as those entrusted with the deposit of faith he had given them. What Jesus required of them was not just for themselves, but those whose care they had been entrusted with and beyond them to all the nations. His parable was for both the Twelve first and foremost, and then to their successors and all who would choose to be his followers.

Unfortunately, we have witnessed those in Church leadership who have in effect, “beat the menservants and the maidservants, to eat and drink and get drunk” (Lk 12:45) on their own power. Those who have: abused children, covered abuse, skimmed off the top of the donations from the blood, sweat, and tears of their parishioners’ donations, limited access to positions within the leadership of the Church to only male or clergy, been unmerciful confessors, held up the sin of one group or groups while turning a blind eye to others. These and other forms of hypocrisy do irreparable damage.

The world has been darkened by sin and it has crept into the Church. Even though all of us have been wounded we have not been destroyed by sin. The Son of God entered into the condition of our fallen nature, became one of us, one with us, in all things except sin. Yet he received our sin and the sin of the world upon himself, and was crushed by it on the Cross, and he died. Jesus experienced the consequences of our sin which led to his death. Because he did not sin, and was willing to give his life for us, giving us all of himself and holding nothing back, not even his life, throught the power of the Holy Spirit, he conquered sin and death.

Even when those in his name have participated in and perpetuated in that which Jesus warned his Apostles against, we are not to lose heart nor hope. I agree with Bishop Robert Barron that we are called out of “the realm of hatred, racism, sexism, violence, oppression, imperialism, what Augustine termed the libido dominandi (the lust to dominate).”

We are called out of darkness to be children of the light. We do so by following Mary’s directive to do whatever Jesus tells us to do and reject anything that is not of his love. This is just what the saints have done. They were purified in the crucible of the love of the Holy Spirit and became a radiating light in the darkness. They reflected the light of Jesus in their time and place. We will be like them when we are willing to, in the words of St. John Paul II, “be taken over by the light of Christ, and spread that light wherever” we “are.”

Photo: Reflecting the light of Jesus in the darkness as the moon reflects the sun is our call.

Barron, Robert. Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith. NY: Image, 2014

Link for the Mass readings for Wednesday, October 22, 2025

We are better prepared for the unexpected when our relationship with Jesus grows daily.

Jesus said to his disciples: “Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks” (Lk 12: 35-36).

As disciples, we need to be ready for the coming of Jesus. Yes, for when he comes again at the end of time, but just as importantly, to be prepared for his coming each day in the midst of our lives. If we do not prepare to encounter him daily, the likelihood of us being prepared for his coming again will be slimmer, and only the Father knows the time or the hour.

To plan something means that we outline all that needs to be done down to the last detail. This can be an advantage especially when we are dealing with blueprints for a home or building. By having detailed plans we can be sure that we have the proper materials and tools, an estimated budget, and hire the help needed to accomplish the goal. I have been blessed to experience this process as we have been overseeing the rebuilding and renovation of our church which was damaged a year ago.

There are many areas in our life where planning has its advantages. Planning our spiritual life is important, deciding when and how we are to pray, meditate, study, engage in Bible and spiritual reading and/or which service we are going to attend, establishing a routine of spiritual direction, time for fellowship and small groups, and how, when and where we can serve others. These are all plusses for planning.

The challenge with planning pops up when we become too attached to the plan and we leave no room for the Holy Spirit, no awareness for the knock at the door because we are so focused on sticking to the plan. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners are on the horizon. How many times have we experienced planning a dinner with guests, gotten stressed when things did not go exactly as planned and spent more time adhering to the plan and its execution such that we missed engaging with those we were working so hard to provide hospitality for? Martha learned this lesson.

Preparing is akin to planning, in that we get ready for an endeavor but we are more flexible to other options not governed by our fixed mind and our sense of being in control. Jesus calls us to be prepared to receive him at any moment. Are we prepared to encounter and be present to a classmate, colleague, family member, or neighbor who asks for help at an inopportune time, the homeless person in need, the undocumented immigrant, migrant, or refugee looking for safety and security, the unborn striving to actualize his or her potential, the coworker that has not been the most pleasant, the person that we perceive as somehow different from us – who we keep at arm’s length?

The complementarity of planning and preparing shows best when unexpected events in life arise. When we heard of JoAnn’s diagnosis we went into planning mode, and as anyone who has spent any time with JoAnn knows, she was in her element when there was some planning to be done. There were many things in those final months we planned for and for the most part, they came together. There were also interruptions and blocks to the plan where we needed to adjust, sometimes without notice. Preparing helped us to be flexible and so open to following the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Even before JoAnn’s diagnosis, she often said that life was hard. She saw many people suffering and couldn’t understand why people couldn’t be kinder to one another. St. Oscar Romero wrote, “It would be beautiful if people saw that their flourishing and the attainment of their highest ideals are based on their ability to give themselves to others.” In her suffering, JoAnn focused less on her condition and became more compassionate and empathetic.

We can better give ourselves to others when we focus less on ourselves, and resist following the voices of our fears, wounds, and insecurities. We are much better prepared when we invite Jesus into our poverty so that we will instead experience courage, healing, and security grounded in his love for us. When we daily trust and follow Jesus in each situation, ground ourselves in his love, we will experience life more fully, handle challenges more gracefully, and our hearts will expand and be more compassionate toward others.

Photo: Beautiful stained glass of those trusting in Jesus from our neighbors at St. John of the Cross.

Link for the Mass readings for Tuesday, October 21, 2025