Messages of 3-13-12

Published: Tue, 03/13/12


A Daily Spiritual Seed
- resources for prayer and spiritual growth


Message of the Day

It makes a great difference in our feelings towards others if their needs and their joys are on our lips in prayer; as also it makes a vast difference in their feelings towards us if they know that we are in the habit of praying for them. There is no chasm in society that cannot be firmly and permanently bridged by intercession; there is no feud or dislike that cannot be healed by the same exercise of love.
  - Charles H. Brent (1862-1929), With God in the World

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Lectionary Readings of the Day
   http://www.usccb.org/calendar/index.cfm?showLit=1&action=month

Dn 3:25, 34-43;    Ps 25:4-5ab, 6 and 7bc, 8-9;    Mt 18:21-35

R. (6a) Remember your mercies, O Lord.

Your ways, O LORD, make known to me;
teach me your paths,
Guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my savior.

Remember that your compassion, O LORD,
and your kindness are from of old.
In your kindness remember me,
because of your goodness, O LORD.

Good and upright is the LORD;
thus he shows sinners the way.
He guides the humble to justice,
he teaches the humble his way.

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Reflection on the Gospel
  - from Daily Bread
    http://www.preacherexchange.com/daily_bread.htm

Jesus answered, "I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times."

Jesus instructs us to forgive without limits. There's always someone, however, whom we find hard to forgive. We may try to justify our lack of mercy. We may think we've been patient or generous enough and that no one, not even God, could expect us to reach out yet again. Still, there are few things heavier to carry than a grudge. Jesus asks us to forgive not only for the benefit of those who wronged us but also for our own healing and wholeness. In justice, we must be willing to reach out continually to our brothers and sisters in forgiveness, no matter how often and how deeply they hurt us.

Lord, give us the grace to model your compassion and to forgive others freely and fully, we pray.

   - Patricia Russell

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Spiritual Reading
The Way of Perfection
  - by Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)

(Continues to treat of mortification and explains how one must renounce the world's standards of wisdom in order to attain to true wisdom.)

I often tell you, sisters, and now I want it to be set down in writing, not to forget that we in this house, and for that matter anyone who would be perfect, must flee a thousand leagues from such phrases as: "I had right on my side"; "They had no right to do this to me"; "The person who treated me like this was not right". God deliver us from such a false idea of right as that! Do you think that it was right for our good Jesus to have to suffer so many insults, and that those who heaped them on Him were right, and that they had any right to do Him those wrongs? I do not know why anyone is in a convent who is willing to bear only the crosses that she has a perfect right to expect: such a person should return to the world, though even there such rights will not be safeguarded. Do you think you can ever possibly have to bear so much that you ought not to have to bear any more? How does right enter into the matter at all? I really do not know.

- Chapter 13

(Keep in mind that she is writing to sisters in a cloistered contemplative order.)

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