Monday 5 October 2020
Monday of week 27 in Ordinary Time
or Saint Faustina Kowalska, Religious
or Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, Priest
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
Monday of week 27 in Ordinary Time
St Ambrose on Cain and Abel
Above all, we should pray for the whole body of the Church
Offer to God a sacrifice of praise and pay your vows to the Most High. To praise God is both to make your vow and to fulfil it. That is why the Samaritan in the story is placed above his companions: with nine other lepers he was cured of his leprosy by the command of the Lord, but he alone came back to Christ, praised the greatness of God and gave thanks. Jesus said of him: There was none of these who returned and thanked God, except this foreigner. And he said to him: Rise up and go on your way, for your faith has made you whole.
The Lord Jesus also taught you about the goodness of the Father, who knows how to give good things: and so you should ask for good things from the One who is good. Jesus told us to pray urgently and often, so that our prayers should not be long and tedious but short, earnest and frequent. Long elaborate prayers overflow with pointless phrases, and long gaps between prayers eventually stretch out into complete neglect.
Next he advises that when you ask forgiveness for yourself then you must take special care to grant it also to others. In that way your action can add its voice to yours as you pray. The apostle also teaches that when you pray you must be free from anger and from disagreement with anyone, so that your prayer is not disturbed or broken into.
The apostle teaches us to pray anywhere, while the Saviour says Go into your room – but you must understand that this “room” is not the room with four walls that confines your body when you are in it, but the secret space within you in which your thoughts are enclosed and where your sensations arrive. That is your prayer-room, always with you wherever you are, always secret wherever you are, with your only witness being God.
Above all, you must pray for the whole people: that is, for the whole body, for every part of your mother the Church, whose distinguishing feature is mutual love. If you ask for something for yourself then you will be praying for yourself only – and you must remember that more grace comes to one who prays for others than to any ordinary sinner. If each person prays for all people, then all people are effectively praying for each.
In conclusion, if you ask for something for yourself alone, you will be the only one asking for it; but if you ask for benefits for all, all in their turn will be asking for them for you. For you are in fact one of the “all.” Thus it is a great reward, as each person’s prayers acquire the weight of the prayers of everyone. There is nothing presumptuous about thinking like this: on the contrary, it is a sign of greater humility and more abundant fruitfulness.
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Other choices for today:
Saint Faustina Kowalska, Religious
From the diary of St Faustina
The mission of proclaiming and begging divine mercy for the world
O my God, I am conscious of my mission in the Holy Church. It is my constant endeavour to plead for mercy for the world. I unite myself closely with Jesus and stand before him as an atoning sacrifice on behalf of the world. God will refuse me nothing when I entreat him with the voice of his Son. My sacrifice is nothing in itself, but when I join it to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, it becomes all-powerful and has the power to appease divine wrath. God loves us in his Son; the painful Passion of the Son of God constantly turns aside the wrath of God.
O God, how I desire that souls come to know you and to see that you have created them because of your unfathomable love. O my Creator and Lord, I feel that I am going to remove the veil of heaven so that earth will not doubt your goodness.
Make of me, Jesus, a pure and agreeable offering before the face of your Father. Jesus, transform me, miserable and sinful as I am, into your own self (for you can do all things), and give me to your eternal Father. I want to become a sacrificial host before you, but an ordinary wafer to people. I want the fragrance of my sacrifice to be known to you alone. O eternal God, an unquenchable fire of supplication for your mercy burns within me. I know and understand that this is my task, here and in eternity. You yourself have told me to speak about this great mercy and about your goodness.
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Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, Priest
From the letters of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos
Place nothing ahead of God's love
This desire to bring a sacrifice to God again and again extends to everything that I ever loved in this life, and upon which my heart was set.
When I think of the beauties of nature, these do not stir up longing and melancholy, but I am filled with the greatest joy, because, since I am not giving God any real and true gifts, I can give him imagined and pretended ones. At the same time, in the overflowing of my good fortune, I cannot at all get away from the thought that in heaven God will give me those that, for him, I have forsaken in the world, and for this I also constantly pray.
And so, the novitiate and its completion, the taking of vows, the life with confrères of the Order, and above all, the insight to cherish these goods to the best of my ability, so that there is nothing left for me to desire, except to fulfil my duties better — these were the first blessings of divine mercy.
Everything was completely against my nature. But precisely the joyful acceptance of them, in God’s boundless grace, made so clear to me the mystery of renunciation and patience in this world that I feel that I am much too fortunate in the possession of my religious confrères and all the spiritual and temporal blessings that are bound together with it. And what is still more, that God has exalted me so high as to announce the Gospel to the poor, and to teach, and share with them his treasures.
Every offering has value only insofar as one snatches it away from one’s own benefit and dedicates it to God through this self-conquest. One loves and gives precisely because one loves, and because one considers what is given as a good, as a treasure. Love of creatures must be subordinated to the love of God, whom one is pledged to love above all things.
Time, in which we have found nothing to offer up to God, is lost for eternity. If it is only the duties of our vocation that we fulfil with dedication to the will of God; if it is the sweat of our faces that, in resignation, we wipe from our brow without murmuring; if it is suffering, temptations, difficulties with our fellow-men — everything we can present to God as an offering and can, through them, become like Jesus his Son. Where the sacrifice is great and manifold, there, in the same proportion, is the hope of glory more deeply and more securely grounded in the heart of him who makes it.
Copyright © 1996-2020 Universalis Publishing Limited: see www.universalis.com. Scripture readings from the Jerusalem Bible are published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. Text of the Psalms: Copyright © 1963, The Grail (England). Used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. All rights reserved.