Message of 5-25-12

Published: Fri, 05/25/12


A Daily Spiritual Seed
- resources for prayer and spiritual growth


Message of the Day

You ask then how I knew He was present, when His ways can in no way be traced? He is life and power, and as soon as He enters in, He awakens my slumbering soul; He stirs and soothes and pierces my heart, for before it was hard as stone, and diseased.
- Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, 12th C -

(Invite God to awaken the slumbering parts of your soul, that you may know the life he offers to all.)

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

Acts 25:13b-21;    Ps 103:1-2, 11-12, 19-20;    Jn 21:15-19

R. (19a) The Lord has established his throne in heaven.

Bless the LORD, O my soul;
and all my being, bless his holy name.
Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits.

For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so surpassing is his kindness toward those who fear him.
As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he put our transgressions from us.

The LORD has established his throne in heaven,
and his kingdom rules over all.
Bless the LORD, all you his angels,
you mighty in strength, who do his bidding.

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Reflection on the Scriptures
-  http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/daily.html

We have been reading and hearing the Gospel according to St. Mark throughout this liturgical year. While Matthew and Luke make it clear that his disciples didn’t get Jesus’ message and, ultimately, let him down, Mark is particularly harsh in his characterization of that failure, desertion, and betrayal. Most recently, the women who otherwise do not figure prominently in Mark’s account, when they come onto center stage Easter morning, even they let him down. Told to tell the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, they “tell no one” out of fear. Human weakness and failure. Mark won’t let us dodge confronting that painful reality.

G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere: “If you are to build a perfect society, start with imperfect people.” He might have gotten this insight from today’s Gospel passage. The resurrected Jesus gently but forcefully reminds Peter, on whom he will build his church, of his threefold denial just a few days earlier. And yet, after each reminder, he entrusts to Peter the responsibility of tending Jesus’ own flock.

We wouldn’t have done it that way. Instead, we would have been more inclined to say: “Peter proved himself unworthy; give the post to somebody else.” – thinking of the job as recognition or reward. If we needed to be reminded yet again, scripture tells us “God’s thoughts are not your thoughts, God’s ways are not your ways”.

- Robert P. Heaney

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Spiritual Reading

On Cleaving to God
     by St. Albert the Great

Now since all things other than God are the effect and work of the Creator himself, their having ability and being is a limited power and existence, and being as they are created out of nothing, they are circumscribed by the effects of their nothingness, while their tendency of themselves towards nothingness means that we receive our existence, preservation and activity moment by moment from the Creator himself, along with whatever other qualities created things may have, just as we receive their insufficiency to any action of themselves, both with regard to themselves and to others, in relation to him whose operation they are, they remain as a nothing before something which exists, and as something finite before what is infinite. For this reason let all our actual contemplation, life and activity take place in him alone, about him, for him and towards him  who is able and capable to produce with a single nod of his will things infinitely more perfect than any that exist now.  

- Chapter 9. How much the contemplation of God is to be preferred to all other exercises.

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