Saint Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr

The grace  and consolation of the Christian life is given to those who live and act in faith.  Growth in our spiritual life implies pain in just the same way as our bodies experienced growing pains while they were stretched to accommodate our full physical maturity.  The spiritually mature do not reach maturity without passing through various, successive and painful deaths.  The body stretches painfully to become the place of a soul capable of living out the fullness of it’s human life.  The soul is stretched painfully through the guilt and grief of a life lived according to false notions of fullness.  Suffering is much more important for our spiritual life than the simple punishment for misdeeds – our own or the misdeeds of others.  Christ shows us that suffering is actually the path of holiness which best frees us from our attachment to a life that is beneath our deepest thirst for happiness.  Some spiritual growth can only take place when the love that causes us to cling to the world and its passing pleasures faces its own vanity and anxious drive to indulge. read more

Thursday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time

The new covenant is foretold by the prophet Jeremiah.  We must regularly examine our hearts to see if we are living according to the new covenant, or if we are still stuck in the old.  Make no mistake!  All Christian religiosity and practice is not “new testament” simply because it has the label Christian or is practiced by the Baptised.  The Old Covenant remains a sort of religious default that we fall back on, even as Christians, when we stop living according to the Spirit.  The Old Covenant provides a set of standards, clarity on right and wrong, consequences and punishments reserved for sinners.  If you want to avoid suffering – especially the eternal kind – the Old Covenant tells you what to do and how to behave.  The New Covenant does not cancel any of that truth, but addresses the much more fundamental problem of our existence: we are incapable, on our own, of any real goodness.  The New Covenant addresses the root of our problem, we need to be healed, forgiven, and supported by God’s help.  It is our heart that needs God’s touch because it is wayward and susceptible to all manner of evil suggestion.  If evil gets into our heart, our mind will be unable to straighten things out – even if it perceives the evil as evil.  To pretend or presume that there is no evil in our hearts, or that the evil present there isn’t so bad is precisely the lack of humility and poverty that will keep God’s new covenant of grace from acting. read more

Saint Dominic, priest

AUGUSTINE:

But she was ignored, not that mercy might be denied but that desire might be enkindled; not only that desire might be enkindled but, as I said before, that humility might be praised.

CHRYSOSTOM:

But if anyone should say, “Why then does he allow this woman to approach him when he says to the disciples, ‘Do not go in the way of the Gentiles’?” We first note that he himself, being who he is, was not, strictly speaking, required to obey the command that he gave to the disciples. We observe, second, that Jesus was not going there to preach. This is the very point that Mark implies when he says both that Jesus hid himself and that he could not escape notice. The fact that he did not run to them first was consistent with the order of the tasks set before him. In exactly the same way, driving away people who were coming to him was unworthy of his love for humanity. For if one should pursue those who are trying to escape, much more should one not try to escape those who are pursuing. read more