FEAST OF ST. MATTHEW, APOSTLE & EVANGELIST - 2021

DAILY HOLY MASS READINGS

We praise you, O God,
we acknowledge you to be the Lord.
The glorious company of the apostles praise you, O Lord. Te Deum

EPHESIANS 4:1-7,11-13 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

We are prisoners only in so far as we are shackled by chains of love and constrained by our love for You. If this is true of us then our vocation in this life is to conform our lives to the life of grace that we received at our baptism. A Christian is worthy of the name only when we are 'alter Christus' when we live together in charity when we are completely selfless, always gentle, and patient with each other. When we are united as one in the peace of the Holy Spirit. 

The greatest tragedy that plagues Your Body is the disunity among Christians. It is  Satan's modus operandi to divide and conquer and Christians refuse to see that they are mere pawns in his diabolic game. Clueless, willfully blind, and woefully conceited and stubborn they lack the humility to concede to Eternal Truth.  

St. Paul speaks succinctly and unequivocally when he says, 'There is one Body, one Spirit, just as you were all called into one and the same hope when you were called. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all, over all, through all and within all.'

Every Christian has his or her role to play in building up Your Body and although we are all brothers and sisters each is assigned a task that God has assigned to us and given us the necessary grace to carry it out. To some, his gift was that they should be apostles; to some, prophets; to some, evangelists; to some, pastors and teachers. There is a clear hierarchy. It is God's way whether we agree or not and we must follow it as saints who together build up Your Body which is the Catholic Church. She is the light on the hill and she beckons all God's children to ascend to her, discover that in her God dwells in fullness, so:

'In this way we are all to come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect Man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.'

This is God's way whether we agree or not and we must obey and follow if we desire to share in Your glory.

PSALM 19:2-5 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

How blessed I am that God created me and that I am His child and because I believe in His Word, I am co-heir with You to the Kingdom of God.

Even as God breathed forth His Eternal Word that lay the foundations of the earth and created the first man and the first woman He knew that they would misuse the exquisite gift of free will to choose to do expressly that which He forbade them to do. Thus they lost God's friendship - but not eternally, for God already had a preposterously unbelievable plan to restore what our first parents willfully and tragically lost forever. 

Thank You, beloved Father, for leaving an indelible impression of Your love for us in the world. You pierced time and space to send Your only Son to come into the world in order that we could touch the Face of God in Him. Despite the fact that You knew we would smite Him and kill Him, nevertheless, He was to be the means by which He would pay, with His life, the price for our redemption. 

Today, we see signs of God's love everywhere in the sky, in the beauty of nature, in living things, in all the works of His hands, and above all in the crown of His creation, redeemed humanity. 

The Eternal Word of the Father is the endless lovesong of the Holy Spirit that draws us all back into the Father's bosom. No speech, no word, no voice is heard yet it encompasses the whole earth to the utmost bounds of the world, telling us ceaselessly that God loves us. 

MATTHEW 9:9-13 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

Each of us is Matthew sitting by the customs house and involved, obsessed, and consumed by the things of the world. We are unhappy, unfulfilled, and we have this great inner aching void that we try to fill with things that decay and perish; ignorant, unaware, or perhaps deliberately closed to the one Truth that alone can fill and satisfy. 

Today the Church celebrates the feast of Matthew the tax collector, the public sinner, whom You deliberately sought out and invited to follow You. He did and by accepting Your invitation he was transformed in You. You chose him to be an Apostle, one of the 12, who are the foundation stones of the Church You built on Peter the Rock and with You as its Cornerstone. Matthew left behind a sad, lonely life to embrace and live the greatest of all adventures, discipleship with You. 

Today, You extend the same invitation to everyone, and no one is left out for as You told the Pharisees who publicly pointed out Matthew's shortcomings, 'It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick.' It will do us all who self-righteously condemn everyone to hell to pay heed to Your words today, Go and learn the meaning of the words: 'What I want is mercy, not sacrifice. And indeed I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners.’