Message of 10-29-12

Published: Mon, 10/29/12


A Daily Spiritual Seed
- resources for prayer and spiritual growth


Message of the Day

Be the door-keeper of your heart and do not let any thought come in without questioning it. Question each thought individually: 'Are you on our side or the side of our foes?' And if it is one of ours, it will fill you with tranquility.
- Evagrius of Pontus, "Letter 11"

(This capacity to discern which thoughts one consents to allowing entrance to the heart is an important discipline to develop. Be more attentive to your thinking processes this day.)

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

Eph 5:21-33;    Ps 128:1-5;    Lk 13:18-21

R. (1a) Blessed are those who fear the Lord.

Blessed are you who fear the LORD,
who walk in his ways!
For you shall eat the fruit of your handiwork;
blessed shall you be, and favored.

Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine
in the recesses of your home;
Your children like olive plants
around your table.

Behold, thus is the man blessed
who fears the LORD.
The LORD bless you from Zion:
may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life.

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

When Jesus saw her, he called to her and said, "Woman, you are set free of your infirmity."

Jesus flaunts his disregard for the absolute legalism that flies in the face of common sense. Over and over in scripture we see Jesus acting on behalf of the suffering, even if it means breaking the rules. So many parallels to this lesson exist today. One that immediately comes to mind is the way many people want to treat undocumented workers. It makes no difference if they were brought here as children, or if they have no other home or family, or if they have worked from sunup to sundown for meager wages to harvest our food so it will not rot in the fields.

Lord, show us your ways, we pray.

  - Portia Clark

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Spiritual Reading

The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage
   by St. John of Rusybroeck (1293-1381)

For all loving spirits desire and strive after God, each according to its nobleness and the measure in which it has been touched by God; yet God remains eternally incomprehensible by way of our active desires, and therefore there abides in us, together with all saints, an eternal hunger, and an eternal desirous introversion. And in the meeting with God, the radiance and the heat are so great and so limitless that all spirits must fail in their activity, and must melt and vanish away in sensible love in the unity of their spirit. And here they must passively endure as sheer creatures the working of God. And here our spirit and Divine grace and all our virtues are one sensible love without activity; for our spirit has spent itself and has itself become love. And here the spirit is simple and susceptible of all gifts and is capable of every virtue. And, in this ground of sensible love, there dwells the gushing spring, that is, the inpouring or inward working of God, which at every hour moves us and urges us and draws us inward and causes us to flow forth into new works of virtue. Thus I have shown to you the ground and the condition of all the virtues.

- Chapter 63: Of the ordering of all the virtues through the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

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