Daily Thought

Why The Church Is Important To put it quite concretely: It is the Church that, despite all the human foibles of the people in her, gives us Jesus Christ, and only through her can we receive him as a living, authoritative reality that summons and endows me here and now. Henri de Lubac formulated this state of affairs as follows: “Do they realize that if they still receive Christ, it is to the Church they owe it?… Jesus lives for us. But without the visible continuity of the Church, the desert sands would have long since swallowed up, if not perhaps his name and his memory, certainly the influence of his gospel and faith in his divinity.… ‘Without the Church, Christ evaporates or is fragmented or cancels himself out.’ And without Christ what would man be?” This elementary acknowledgment has to be made at the start: Whatever infidelity there is or may be in the Church, however true it is that she constantly needs to be measured anew by Jesus Christ, still there is ultimately no opposi...

The Importance of The Sabbath Lectio Luke 14:1–6 Meditatio “… on the Sabbath.…” Oh, that thorny Sabbath! It seems that every time Jesus turns around he is locking horns with someone over this day of rest. Today a man appears, suffering the joint pain and fever of edema, and everybody else wrangles over what’s “lawful.” Since Jesus is sharing a meal with lawyers of the Torah, whose giftedness lies in their razor-sharp minds, Jesus shrewdly frames his question to them in legal terms. Then, typically, he takes everyone a step further, from a father’s—and his Father’s—perspective, effortlessly healing the man in the process. They’re dumbfounded. Apparently they forgot who heals. If God heals—they suppose that this Jesus has no curative power of his own—then God must want to make his loved ones whole even on the Sabbath, especially on the Sabbath. With his example, Jesus challenges them to examine what this rest is really for. They know that it hearkens back to Genesis, when Go...

Do Not Stifle The Holy Spirit The Scriptures say without hesitation that God's Spirit lives in us, gives us life, speaks to us in silence, inspires us, and that it is so much a part of us that we are united with the Lord in Spirit. This is basic Christian teaching.  The Spirit of God is the soul of our soul! We are blind if we think that we are alone in the interior sanctuary. God is actually more present in this place than we are. We are constantly inspired, but we suppress the inspiration. God is always speaking to us, but the external noise of the world and the internal churning of our passions confuse us. We can't hear him speaking. Everything around us needs to be silent, and we must be quiet within. We need to focus our entire being to hear the soft whisper of his voice. The only ones who hear it are those who listen to nothing else.  It is unfortunate that the soul is so infrequently still.  Our selfish desires interfere with the voice within us. We are aw...

Worship—God Invites & We Respond The so-called Didache of the apostles, a book that dates from about 90 or 100 A.D., records a tradition that had long been accepted as a matter of course: “Assemble together on the Lord’s Day, break bread, and give thanks, having first confessed your sins so that your offering will be pure” (Did 14:1). We can be certain of this, then: it is not the role of the Church or of any individual Christian to decide whether or when we should celebrate the divine liturgy or what we should decide to do with our Sunday. Someone may object: But I dislike the bad air in the church and the worn-out hymns. It bothers me to kneel crowded together with all kinds of people whom I do not know and to hear the priest recite prayers that I cannot understand. I prefer to go up into the mountains, into the woods, or on the water, and I am more pious in God’s free nature than in a congregation that has nothing to offer me. In reply one might say: It cannot be that we cho...

Groaning We all do it—groaning. Something goes wrong, and we sigh dejectedly. We hear bad news, and we moan in disappointment. Disappointment in itself is a natural thing, but when you feel moved to groaning, what does it tell you about the situation? And more important, what will your groaning move you to do? When you come right down to it, groaning is a sign that deep down, we recognize that all is not as it should be. We all have an inner, hidden sense of the glory God wants us to experience. And we all know that we fall short of that glory. We understand too that we are still works in progress, that we don’t yet experience the fullness of the life we were made for. And so we groan longingly, like a woman in labor. She knows that her baby is coming, but isn’t here yet. She knows that the process is painful, but she also trusts that the result will be glorious. Believe it or not, groaning is actually a sign of hope! We groan because we know and believe that we are meant for m...

Powerful Message From Pope Francis The three Readings for this Sunday show us God’s compassion, his fatherhood, definitively revealed in Jesus. In the midst of a national disaster, the people deported by their enemies, the prophet Jeremiah proclaims that “the Lord has saved his people, the remnant of Israel” (31:7).  Why did he save them?  Because he is their Father (cf. v. 9); and as a Father, he takes care of his children and accompanies them on the way, sustaining “the blind and the lame, the women with child and those in labour” (31:8).  His fatherhood opens up for them a path forward, a way of consolation after so many tears and great sadness.  If the people remain faithful, if they persevere in their search for God even in a foreign land, God will change their captivity into freedom, their solitude into communion: what the people sow today in tears, they will reap tomorrow in joy (cf. Ps 125:6).   We too have expressed, with the Psalm, the joy whic...

Afire With God's Love For myself, I say this to you: The man who burns with the fire of divine love is a son of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and wherever he goes, he enkindles that flame; he deserves and works with all this strength to inflame all men with the fire of God's love. Nothing deters him: he rejoices in poverty; he labors strenuously; he welcomes hardships; he laughs off false accusations; he rejoices in anguish. He thinks only of how he might follow Jesus Christ and imitate him by his prayers, his labors, his sufferings, and by caring always and only for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.”  faith St. Anthony Marie Claret