The power to appreciate and to open the heart is indispensible to the awakening and the maintenance of the mystical appetite. But all the raptures they bring put together are not so effective as the icy chill of a disappointment in knowing that you alone, my God, are stable. It is through sorrow, and not through joy, that your Godhead gradually assumes, in our sentient faculty, the higher Reality in the nature of things.
- Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Times of War

(". . . you alone, my God, are stable."  Rest in the awareness of God's abiding love and presence.)

ROM 4:20-25;    LK 1:69-75;    LK 12:13-21

R. Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has come to his people.

He has come to his people and set them free.
He has raised up for us a mighty savior,
born of the house of his servant David.

Through his holy prophets he promised of old
that he would save us from our enemies,
from the hands of all who hate us.
He promised to show mercy to our fathers
and to remember his holy covenant.

This was the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
free to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight all the days of our life.









Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me."

We don't know anything about this man. Maybe his brother had cheated him, denied him the inheritance that was to have been his. Or maybe he was asking anyone he thought was influential enough to pressure his brother into giving him a share of the inheritance. Jesus refuses to get involved in this family squabble. Instead, he cuts to the heart of the matter: the man's greed. "Take care to guard against all greed," Jesus says. "One's life does not consist of possessions." Jesus' words challenge and warn us that more is never enough because having and holding keeps us from giving and sharing.

Teach us, Lord Jesus, how to be rich in what matters to God.

- by Jeanne Lischer