Whenever I am conscious of Satan’s presence, I try to follow the formula once offered by a little girl: “When Satan knocks, I just send Christ to the door.” - Billy Graham (What door do you need to send Christ to answer these days?)
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JB 19:21-27; PS 27:7-8A, 8B-9ABC, 13-14 LK 10:1-12 Jesus appointed seventy-two other disciples
whom he sent ahead of him in
pairs
to every town and place he intended to visit.
He said to them,
“The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few;
so ask the master of the harvest
to send out laborers for his harvest.
Go on your way;
behold, I am
sending you like lambs among wolves.
Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals;
and greet no one along the way.
Into whatever house you enter, first say,
‘Peace to this household.’
If a peaceful person lives there,
your peace will rest on him;
but if not, it will return to you.
Stay in the same house and eat and drink what is offered to you,
for the laborer deserves his payment.
Do not move about from one house to another.
Whatever town you enter and they welcome you,
eat what is set before you,
cure the sick in it and say to them,
‘The Kingdom of God is at hand for you.’
Whatever town you enter and they do not receive you,
go out into the streets and say,
‘The dust of your town that clings to our feet,
even that we shake off against you.’
Yet know this: the Kingdom of God is at hand.
I tell you,
it will be more tolerable for Sodom on that day
than for that town.”
Reflection on the Scriptures
I must admit that I have not heard much about the Gospel lesson for today in terms of the specifics of the appointment of seventy-two additional disciples that Jesus sent ahead of him to places he intended to
visit. I wondered why that was the case. So, I did a little internet searching about those guys. Sure, they were most likely to have been men, but they could have just as well have been women. Why don’t we know their names? Why didn’t they leave behind their journals for us to read like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did? What I found out is that their stories were not about them, they were about Jesus. And so, their stories could be about any one of us.
Jesus sent them out just like he sends us out. He sent them out to teach, to heal, and to proclaim the living Christ in their midst in every town and place Jesus intended to visit. Like these disciples, we too are to proclaim the good news and do the work of Christ wherever we go. And, like them, we must be prepared to not have an easy job of it. We will not always be well received. Yet, while it will be difficult, we do not have to go alone.
Jesus tells us that we will have companions to accompany us, and we will have partners along the way who will provide us with what we need. Further, we do not have to stick around anyplace where we are not well received. We can do this. We can all be disciples.
-by Barbara Dilly
Psychic Energy and Contemplation by James
Arraj From St. John of the Cross and Dr. C. J. Jung, Part III, Chapter 9. Inner Growth Books, 1986. A Psychological Dark Night Both Jung and John in their own ways are leading the person caught in this predicament of energylessness to a positive new experience, to a new source of energy, and this is how they
differ from the proponents of acquired contemplation. When the recollected person comes up dry, he needs to either add a length of rope to his bucket by a process of psychological development or arrive at other ways of watering the garden by contemplation. But when he is given the advice to practice acquired contemplation, he is being told to exercise his natural faculties with ever greater subtlety, and somehow by this exercise of loving attentiveness attain to the actual experience of
contemplation. This procedure tends only to exhaust the last reaches of psychic energy available to the faculties and pave the way by which psychic energy from the unconscious will burst into the vacuum being created in consciousness. From this point of view it is not at all surprising that a position of acquired contemplation, pushed to its extreme, in, for example, the quietism of Molinos, could give rise to powerful sensual movement that appeared to the recipient as autonomous actions of the
devil. Loving attentiveness is one thing when the inability to meditate is a result of the actual beginning of contemplation, but it is quite another when it is a question not of a new spring of water welling up in the center of the soul, but simply the more general psychological fact that the conscious working of the faculties cannot reach down to
the level of the water. To take up an attitude of loving attentiveness in the latter situation is to expect the water to jump up into the bucket. Men cannot live in a vacuum freed from actual experience. Even in realms of faith and prayer there is a need of experience, though the form it might take can be quite different from everyday ones. St. John with all his emphasis on mortification never suggested trying to live in a void. As he puts it: "For, in order to conquer all the desires and to deny itself the pleasures which it has in everything, and for which its love and affection are wont to enkindle the will that it may enjoy them, it would need to experience another and a greater enkindling by another and a better love, which is that of its Spouse."(29)
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