Reading I Responsorial Psalm GospelPosted on 10/09/2003 8:48:13 AM PDT by Salvation
Reading I Responsorial Psalm GospelReading I
Mal 3:13-20b
You have defied me in word, says the LORD,
yet you ask, "What have we spoken against you?"
You have said, "It is vain to serve God,
and what do we profit by keeping his command,
And going about in penitential dress
in awe of the LORD of hosts?
Rather must we call the proud blessed;
for indeed evildoers prosper,
and even tempt God with impunity."
Then they who fear the LORD spoke with one another,
and the LORD listened attentively;
And a record book was written before him
of those who fear the LORD and trust in his name.
And they shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts,
my own special possession, on the day I take action.
And I will have compassion on them,
as a man has compassion on his son who serves him.
Then you will again see the distinction
between the just and the wicked;
Between the one who serves God,
and the one who does not serve him.
For lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven,
when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble,
And the day that is coming will set them on fire,
leaving them neither root nor branch,
says the LORD of hosts.
But for you who fear my name, there will arise
the sun of justice with its healing rays.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 1:1-2, 3, 4 and 6
R (Ps 40:5a) Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Blessed the man who follows not
the counsel of the wicked
Nor walks in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the company of the insolent,
But delights in the law of the LORD
and meditates on his law day and night.
R Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.
R Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Not so the wicked, not so;
they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
For the LORD watches over the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked vanishes.
R Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Gospel
Lk 11:5-13
Jesus said to his disciples:
"Suppose one of you has a friend
to whom he goes at midnight and says,
‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread,
for a friend of mine has arrived at my house from a journey
and I have nothing to offer him,'
and he says in reply from within,
‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked
and my children and I are already in bed.
I cannot get up to give you anything.'
I tell you, if he does not get up to give him the loaves
because of their friendship,
he will get up to give him whatever he needs
because of his persistence.
"And I tell you, ask and you will receive;
seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks, receives;
and the one who seeks, finds;
and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
What father among you would hand his son a snake
when he asks for a fish?
Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?
If you then, who are wicked,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit
to those who ask him?"
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Do you know how it happens that many who have lived long in religion, and practiced daily so many acts of obedience, have by no means succeeded in acquiring a habit of this virtue? Because not every time they obey, do they do it because such is the will of God (which is the formal reason of obedience); but they obey, now for one cause, now for another, so that their actions, being destitute of mutual similarity, cannot unite to form a habit of this virtue.
--
St Alphonsus Rodriguez
| Thursday, October 09, 2003 Meditation Luke 11:5-13 How many young people do you know who think it would be cool to have a father as wealthy as Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates? With a dad that rich, they would no doubt have all the latest toys and computer games to play with! Whether parents are as wealthy as Bill Gates or have to struggle to make ends meet, most of them have one thing in common: They will try their hardest to lavish as much as they can on their children. Generosity seems to be a natural part of parenthood. Still, being human, parents have their limitations. Even the most generous parents can’t give their children everything God has to offer! As our all-powerful Creator, God has at his disposal every material, spiritual, and emotional answer to our needs. The ultimate sign of this unbounded love is the gift of his only Son for our salvation (John 3:16).
God can never be outdone in generosity toward his children. He has claimed each of us as his own and wants to shower us with all the abundant riches he has to offer. However, in receiving God’s generosity, we sometimes have to be patient and open-minded. God knows our needs—even more fully than we do—and he will generously give us everything we need. But perhaps it will not always be what we had expected. Like the friend in today’s gospel reading, we need to be vigilant in watching and waiting for God’s response, open to the possibility that he may surprise us with something we never expected. And even if he delays in responding, we should continue to trust him, resisting the temptation to turn to someone or something else to fulfill our needs.
Whether we are hungering for food or forgiveness or faith, God does take our requests seriously. He has just the right gifts in store, and we should not be afraid to ask him to shower them down upon us. God is eager to pour out blessing upon blessing on anyone who comes to him. He’ll even give us his own Holy Spirit!
“God of all goodness, I glorify you as my generous and loving Father! Thank you for your awesome gift of the Holy Spirit, who sustains and animates my life. Be generous to me and all who call upon you for this precious gift!” |
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Title: Beyond Merely Moral! Author: Mark Shea Date: Thursday, October 9, 2003
Titus 3:1-2 Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for any honest work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all men.
Some people think that Christianity brought a stunning new morality into the world, as though no mother had ever thought to tell her child not to tell lies, kick dogs, or hate your neighbor before it occurred to Jesus to say these things were bad. But the reality is highlighted by today's verse. Note that Paul tells Titus to "remind" his flock of their elementary moral duties, not to "teach" them these duties. That is because, in large measure, neither Jesus nor the apostles have much new to add to the human race's age-old deposit of moral wisdom. Everybody has always known that speaking evil, quarreling and laziness are bad. Everybody has always known that gentleness, courtesy and honesty are good. But everyone has always needed reminding too, because we are fallen. What is new about the New Covenant is not exactly morality, but the fact that a new power has come into the world through Jesus Christ that enables us (if we are willing) to do more than be minimally moral. In Christ we are empowered to live with the life of God himself. Morality, in light of this, is a bare minimum. In Christ, we are not called to be merely "moral." We are called to be filled with the glorious love of God himself. But, being fallen, we have to start somewhere. And so we have to be reminded of our elementary duties, not because these are the goal but because they are the starting line. Today, let us live out our elementary moral duties, not with an eye to filling a moral quota, but with both eyes on beginning a life of total self-donation to God in love.
Joan of Arcadia is Wolf in Sheep's Clothing 10/09/03
The new television season has provided us with a classic example of "conversion" in the portrayal of God Almighty over the airwaves. One portrayal lasted for nine years on CBS's lineup, and was quite popular. For nine years Touched by an Angel ministered the message that God exists; He loves us, and He has a plan for our lives.
In This Article... We've Outgrown Being Touched Making God Palatable The God That Is Not
We've Outgrown Being Touched
Each episode featured a very human conflict created by selfishness, disrespect, anger, hate, misunderstanding, or miscommunication. Through His Angels, God Almighty would firmly but gently move events and people toward a realization of His love and mercy. By the close, all parties found deeper meaning in their lives, each other and greater closeness with their Creator.
Touched was by no means a perfect show, but it did try to portray The Lord in a loving, merciful, understanding, and interactive manner. This portrayal of God's love reflected both His understanding of our human frailty and His willingness to intervene in some way. The title song conveys the message of the famous poem Footprints: God is with us making our burden light if we believe and trust in Him.
The latest CBS offering has just begun, and all indications are that its creators and network see this as a maturing process whereby they, and we, have "grown up" and are ready to see The Lord as adults in the real world need to see Him in order to make some sense of it all. Joan of Arcadia sounds more like the name of a beauty parlor or pizzeria than any attempt at "religious" programming, but the usual pre-fabricated "reviews" make Joan sound like the second coming of television heaven: this program is "courageous", "creative" and "inspiring". The producers appeal to our "sophistication" by warning us that this show's tone is grittier and is grounded in exploring God more from a "metaphysical standpoint" than from a religious as Touched did. In other words, "Touched" was fluffy vanilla and "Joan" is dark chocolate. Even the title song, "One of Us", by Joan Osborne, has a gritty, irreverent feel.
Making God Palatable
The show centers around God's appearances to a teenage girl who prayed in response to the tragic accident that paralyzed her brother from the waist down. We are told that the anguished family is not religious, does not attend Mass, has moved beyond that: God is not their chosen coping mechanism. God appears to Joan and communicates to her in the form of every kind of human being possible, from a "cute" teenage boy to an African-American cook in the school cafeteria.
Barbara Hall, the executive producer of Joan, bemoans that she has to "show how to make God palatable in this world". In order to do this, Hall notes that she must work to make the program "interesting" and "smart". She follows strict parameters, which she calls her "10 Commandments" for the program. These maxims brought down from Mount Tinseltown include such things as God cannot directly intervene, He can never identify one religion as being right, Our job as human beings is to fulfill our true natures, Everyone is allowed to say no to God, God is not a person and does not possess a human personality, He talks to all of us all the time in different ways, God's plan is what is good for us not what is good for Him, and His purpose in communicating with us is to get us to recognize the interconnectedness of all things.
Hall adds that God is found in the smallest things and actions, He expects us to learn from our experiences, and His exact nature is an unresolvable mystery. God also refuses to violate the physical laws of the universe because it would set a "bad example". Apparently, this Joan learned from the experiences of her French counterpart Joan of Arc, because she does not tell anyone she is speaking to God so people will not think she is "crazy".
The gist of the message here is that the God of Touched is outdated, superficial, boring. "God is not interesting in a benign universe....there need to be scary elements in the show," is how Hall puts it. As one critic said, "If you are looking to spend an hour with some sappy, feel-good, Touched by an Angel, divine do-gooder, look elsewhere."
We are told that God does not directly intervene, yet He appears to a girl to trigger positive actions on her part. We are told that God only works through people, yet the "people" he works through here are only forms which He clearly takes, since He does not "take possession" of anyone or "push" an actual human being to do something.
The God That Is Not
In discussing her rules for the show and its tone, Hall explains that the show is more about her own beliefs than about not offending anyone. In a revealing comment, Hall notes, "part of God is that He is or She is a mystery. While Hall keeps her religious inclinations private, her rules and comments are laced with New Age, feminist, modernist, and humanist tones. The media calls this "progress": moving from the loving, merciful, active God of Touched to the smirking, gritty, peek-a-boo, passive God of Joan.
This is another step on the same road that led from religious to "spiritual" and now defines as "spiritual" what is really "spiritualistic": shows where dead people, dolls, or inanimate objects talk. In this context, Joan is at least a notch above a fortune telling session. That is sad consolation though when we find among the creators of these shows so many discontented Christians and Catholics turned off by what they call "rituals and punishment-oriented mentalities."
We have reached the pathetic point where we note that Joan at least is "not afraid to use the 'G' word" even though it really refers to nothing more than some vague New Age notion of "a higher being". The show is more an ad for its creator's personal beliefs than any transcendental breakthrough in metaphysical thinking. Yes, Joan of Arcadia is about tragedy, but not the one involving a paralyzed boy and his hesitant seer sister. The real tragedy about Joan of Arcadia is that it asks What if God was one of us? despite the fact that the question was answered two thousand years ago on a cross.
© Copyright 2003 Catholic Exchange
The Art of Being 10/09/03
Every year, our town holds an art festival. This year we went. As art festivals go, it was fairly typical. There were lots of formless kiln-fired clay lumps, sticks arranged so that they looked like... well... sticks, and framed examples of what happens when you drop paint on a canvas from a great height.
Driven out of the adults’ area by ugliness — not to mention prices approaching that of my first car, now twenty years gone — we discovered the children’s area. Here, among the face painting, the clay play, and the soap bubble blowing, we found a children’s community mural in progress. The children always enjoy painting, so we stopped to get them paper plate “palettes” and let them daub away.
As they worked, it occurred to me that this single activity summed up all that was wrong with what the ignorant elites term “modern art”.
The term “ignorant elites” is specifically chosen, for their ignorance is of a very specific nature. They are not ignorant of art. Many, if not most, of the self-styled avant-garde who buzz like flies around art’s decaying corpse are quite knowledgeable about various periods of historical art styles, the masters of each style, even the techniques used to create them. Neither are the idolized artists always bereft of talent. Most of the exhibits we had abandoned contained at least one piece that implied the possibility of beauty, except.... except they had not the knowledge.
Ignorance is not necessarily damning. As Will Rogers once observed, everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects. The artists and their “sophisticated” followers lacked only one fact: the why. That was enough.
Like the man born blind who understands form but cannot identify color, today’s sophisticate knows the form of man, but not his color. They don’t know what he is made to do. They see man is natural, an animal like other animals. They conclude there is nothing more. Herein lies their ignorance.
Nature cares not a whit for anyone or anything. It maims and kills without remorse. According to evolutionary theory, over eighty percent of the species that have ever existed were wiped out in the pre-Cambrian explosion, long before man ever came on the scene. This is nature’s form.
But, though man has nature’s form, he is beyond it. This “beyond” is typically referred to as man’s “supernatural” aspect. Man is supernatural because he is what nature is not — he is a person. We have the power to act as persons. That is, we are capable of forming relationships nature cannot form. A person loves, preserves, cares for, other persons. Consequently, a person will even preserve and care for the things of the world, knowing that these things are necessary to the existence of other persons.
When we act supernaturally, we act as persons. We imitate the color, that is, the spirit of God. Christians generally agree that God is three Persons, but they rarely remember the three Persons of God are distinguished only by their relationships. That is, God is three Persons only because there exists within the Godhead exactly three kinds of relations: He who begets and He who is begotten, He who breathes and He who is breathed. Father breathes/begets Son, Son is begotten, Father and Son together breathe/beget Spirit, Spirit is breathed/begotten by Father and Son. One God containing but a communion of interpersonal relationships, and man in His image.
Consequently, man, unlike nature, is always attempting to build personal relationships in the world. Absurdly, we often try to do this even towards non-persons. We put sweaters on dogs, “baby” our cars, and protect threatened owls. But adults are perfected by successive iterations, successively closer steps towards the reality of perfection. As we become better at recognizing and loving persons, we become more like God.
True art is about personal relationships. It teaches children to move from crude drawings of relations between things toward successively greater perfection, more accurate expressions of relationships.
Conversely, sophisticated avant-garde art strives for chaotic crudity, it is purely natural, maiming and killing our proper understanding of ourselves. The painters on a community mural paint without regard to who has come before them, ruthlessly painting over whatever was originally laid down. The work is ephemeral. Like those lost species of the pre-Cambrian explosion, most of what is created is destroyed without ever really being seen. In that sense, the mural expressed the chaos of the natural animal, not the order of the supernatural man.
Children know this is wrong. When a child creates, that creation is meant to be permanent: put on the refrigerator, hung on the mantle. They instinctively know art reflects something that should be eternal, unchanging, true, real and most of all, beautiful. Children paint Mommy, Daddy, Brother and Sister. They know art ultimately expresses personal relationships, that true art perfects our ability to participate in divine, eternal, personal love.
Ultimately, that’s how we got our children to leave the mural. We told them they could bring the paints home, create, and hang their work on the mantle. They abandoned the mural immediately. They understood what was wrong.
© Copyright 2003 Catholic Exchange
Homily of the Day
Title: Do More Than Just Show Up Author: Monsignor Dennis Clark, Ph.D. Date: Thursday, October 9, 2003 Malachi 3:13-20 / Lk 11:5-13
Life is fleeting, and as we watch the years pass by ever faster and faster, we can grow impatient and can even fall victim to despair: Why is life so hard? I try to do the right things, so why don't I have more to show for my efforts? Why do cheaters always prosper? Does God really know or care what's going on? What kind of friend is God? After all this time, what reason do I have for believing that virtue really pays?
The prophet Malachi summed up those fears and frustrations when he quoted some of his own contemporaries: "It is vain to serve God; and what do we profit by keeping his command?" That is surely the way it seems at times. And when those times come, we need to have an answer that is deeply etched in our soul, an answer that comes from the inside.
That answer won't be there, on the inside, if we've been living our life totally on the outside. If our "spirituality" has consisted of "getting our visa stamped," just showing up at church and putting in our time, then we won't have come to know the Lord, we won't have come to see the world through his eyes, and there will be no answers and no spiritual power within us.
If on the other hand, we've come to know not only the words but the Lord who gives life and meaning to the words, then when the inevitable doubts and challenges come, we'll know the truth on the inside and no words will need be spoken.
When the day comes, that's where you want to be. So get to know him now, on the inside. You'll be glad you did every day of your life.
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