Tuesday 5 October 2021
Tuesday 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:
Tuesday of week 27 in Ordinary Time
From St Ignatius of Antioch's letter to the Trallians
I wish to forewarn you, for you are my dearest children
Ignatius, also called Theophorus, to the holy church at Tralles in the province of Asia, dear to God the Father of Jesus Christ, elect and worthy of God, enjoying peace in body and in the Spirit through the passion of Jesus Christ, who is our hope through our resurrection when we rise to him. In the manner of the apostles, I too send greetings to you with the fullness of grace and extend my every best wish.
Reports of your splendid character have reached me: how you are beyond reproach and ever unshaken in your patient endurance – qualities that you have not acquired but are yours by nature. My informant was your own bishop Polybius, who by the will of God and Jesus Christ visited me here in Smyrna. He so fully entered into my joy at being in chains for Christ that I came to see your whole community embodied in him. Moreover, when I learned from him of your God-given kindliness towards me, I broke out in words of praise for God. It is on him, I discovered, that you pattern your lives.
Your submission to your bishop, who is in the place of Jesus Christ, shows me that you are not living as men usually do but in the manner of Jesus himself, who died for us that you might escape death by belief in his death. Thus one thing is necessary, and you already observe it, that you do nothing without your bishop; indeed, be subject to the clergy as well, seeing in them the apostles of Jesus Christ our hope, for if we live in him we shall be found in him.
Deacons, too, who are ministers of the mysteries of Jesus should in all things be pleasing to all men. For they are not mere servants with food and drink, but emissaries of God’s Church; hence they should guard themselves against anything deserving reproach as they would against fire.
Similarly, all should respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, just as all should regard the bishop as the image of the Father, and the clergy as God’s senate and the college of the apostles. Without these three orders you cannot begin to speak of a church. I am confident that you share my feelings in this matter, for I have had an example of your love in the person of your bishop who is with me now. His whole bearing is a great lesson, and his very gentleness wields a mighty influence.
By God’s grace there are many things I understand, but I keep well within my limitations for fear that boasting should be my undoing. At the moment, then, I must be more apprehensive than ever and pay no attention at all to those who flatter me; their praise is as a scourge. For though I have a fierce desire to suffer martyrdom, I know not whether I am worthy of it. Most people are unaware of my passionate longing, but it assails me with increasing intensity. My present need, then, is for that humility by which the prince of this world is overthrown.
And so I strongly urge you, not I so much as the love of Jesus Christ, to be nourished exclusively on Christian fare, abstaining from the alien food that is heresy. And this you will do if you are neither arrogant nor cut off from God, from Jesus Christ, and from the bishop and the teachings of the apostles. Whoever is within the sanctuary is pure; but whoever is not is unclean. That is to say, whoever acts apart from the bishop and the clergy and the deacons is not pure in his conscience. In writing this, it is not that I am aware of anything of the sort among you; I only wish to forewarn you, for you are my dearest children.
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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 © 1996-2021 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.