Sometimes when I pray, it feels like God is all
around me - so close, that when I’m done, I almost hate to say amen. Saying amen - in a way, that’s almost like ending a call…like hanging up, you know? It feels like God just evaporates out of the room. So that made me think…wouldn’t it be great if we could leave a prayer off the hook? Just leave it off the hook forever. Then whenever we stopped to listen, God would be right there breathing. - Laura
Peyton Roberts
A lovely thought! How would you go about leaving the phone “off the hook”? How would you listen?
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Genesis 44:18-21, 23b-29; 45:1-5
Psalm 105:16-17, 18-19, 20-21 Matthew 10:7-15 Jesus instructed the Twelve as follows: ‘As you go,
proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils. You received without charge, give without charge. Provide yourselves with no gold or silver, not even with a few coppers for your purses, with no haversack for the journey or spare tunic or footwear or a staff, for the workman deserves his keep.
‘Whatever town or village you go into, ask for someone trustworthy and stay with him
until you leave. As you enter his house, salute it, and if the house deserves it, let your peace descend upon it; if it does not, let your peace come back to you. And if anyone does not welcome you or listen to what you have to say, as you walk out of the house or town shake the dust from your feet. I tell you solemnly, on the day of Judgement it will not go as hard with the land of Sodom and Gomorrah as with that town.’
Reflection on the Scriptures
Bring peace. In our societies, we are repeatedly told to be anxious. Commercials tell us we will not be safe unless we get more insurance, a retirement investment plan, a security system
for our home, a particular medication, and so on. Politicians around the world solicit support for their policies by stoking fears of people who think, act or look differently. We, though, are called to place our hope in God.
Today’s first reading provides a good example of what happens when an individual brings faithful good news, healing and peace to a very nervous
group of people. Joseph’s brothers were already anxious as they found themselves far from home in the presence of an important political administrator. Their anxiety must have intensified as they learned this powerful fellow was the brother they had abused and sold into slavery. Joseph calls for peace – do not be distressed – and describes God at work in the world. In the process, he brings healing in the form of forgiveness and
reconciliation.
-by David Crawford
The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, by James Arraj
https://innerexplorations.com/catchtheomor/resurrecion.htm Inner Growth Publications, 2007.
Chapter 4: The Resurrection of Jesus Space and the Resurrection Body . Just as there is a process of human genesis, there is a process of human death in which the form of the spiritual soul departs, leaving the animal soul
for a while before it, too, departs, leaving the vegetative soul still present, and at the time of its departure another form becomes the highest form, and thus the principle of being and action. In this way we can imagine a hominization that leads to birth, and a dehominization in death, both of which processes St. Thomas took note of.63 But why can’t we say that as long as any of the lesser forms of the body remain, even the flesh or the bones or the disintegrated fragments of the body, they retain a relationship with the spiritual soul that once animated them, and at the time of the resurrection they will form part of the resurrection body? But if it is so, then we can understand the concern of the Christian community to preserve
and venerate the bodies of the martyrs and all the faithful, as well as its reluctance to sanction cremation. We can then also understand the veneration of relics. Further, we might even speculate that these remains of the body contain in some way resonances of the higher formal energies that once animated them, and which still exist. Further, there
is no reason to believe that this glorification of the body will be divorced from the glorification of the earth, and indeed, from that of the entire universe, for the body is a microcosm, a blossoming of the evolution of the universe. This transformation of the universe is a theme we find expressed a number of times in the New Testament in terms of a new heaven and a new earth, and we find it expressed in a particularly vivid way in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans where he writes: “From the
beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free.” (8:22-23) How this will take place pushes our imaginations to the limit, but we need not and ought not, however, hold to a “resuscitationalist” view of creation as if it were to return in the same way as it was before, but again, it was meant to be
transformed.
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