THURSDAY OF WEEK 25 IN ORDINARY TIME - 2024

DAILY HOLY MASS READINGS

I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, says the Lord;
No one can come to the Father except through me. JN 14:6

ECCLESIASTES 1:2-11

My Soul's Beloved,

The wise know and understand that everything is fleeting. Our lives here are brief but we are so self-absorbed that we make our whole of life about ourselves spending the better part of it navel-gazing and barely lifting our eyes to look at the world and those in it. The more we are closed in on ourselves and on our needs and wants, grasping greedily and accumulating as much as we can for ourselves we will never know true peace and joy. 

We come and go like mist in the sun and our names are not remembered. We are born, we live, we commit the same sins in every generation. We are scandalized by the wicked ways of the world and we are aghast when we read how depravity flourishes in the lives of some and imagine that evil has not ruled the hearts of people in the measure that it is in our day and age. But history repeats itself with predictable certainty. There are no new sins for all sins are as old as Satan, the great deceiver.

The Church is to be commended for she keeps alive in her memory, for all generations, and until the end of time, the lives of the great saints, both women and men, great and small, rich and poor, intellectual giants, and the humble, simple illiterate who have all discovered the one great infallible truth - that the only way to true joy is to follow You closely and model our lives on You and the Blessed Virgin. Our gaze must be fixed on You and we must follow humbly and closely in Your footsteps only then can the Holy Spirit make us like You - alter Christus. 

What was will be again; what has been done will be done again; and there is nothing new under the sun. Take anything of which it may be said, ‘Look now, this is new.’ Already, long before our time, it existed. Only no memory remains of earlier times, just as in times to come next year itself will not be remembered.

PSALM 89(90):3-6,12-14,17

O Lord, you have been our refuge from one generation to the next.

You turn men back to dust

  and say: ‘Go back, sons of men.’

To your eyes a thousand years

  are like yesterday, come and gone,

  no more than a watch in the night.

You sweep men away like a dream,

  like the grass which springs up in the morning.

In the morning it springs up and flowers:

  by evening it withers and fades.

Make us know the shortness of our life

  that we may gain wisdom of heart.

Lord, relent! Is your anger for ever?

  Show pity to your servants.

In the morning, fill us with your love;

  we shall exult and rejoice all our days.

Let the favour of the Lord be upon us:

  give success to the work of our hands.

O Lord, you have been our refuge from one generation to the next.

LUKE 9:7-9

My Soul's Beloved,

There will always be a new John the Baptist, a new Elijah, new voices in the wilderness calling people, in every age and in every generation, to repentance and conversion. Will one of these voices be mine? By virtue of my baptism I have been given the same mission that You entrusted to the Apostles and disciples - Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ Yet, Lord, how many of us who are baptized into Your Body, grafted on to You, take this mandate seriously? Too few.

But we do have Your assurance O Lord that the Church will survive all the storms that batter her relentlessly. There will even be periods in history when it appears that evil has finally won and she will be destroyed but that will never happen for we know that the Church is Your Bride. The Holy Spirit will constantly raise holy men and women from the hierarchy as well as the laity to speak boldly, lead fearlessly, and readily lay down their lives for You. Many will be called to shed their blood as You did for us, and their blood will bring forth new sons and daughters of God and members of Your Body. Kill one member of Your Body and a hundred more will arise. Let us not lose heart but pray for the grace and courage to willingly, boldly, and joyfully preach the Gospel in season and out of season even if it will cost us our lives. 

Herod the tetrarch had heard about all that was being done by Jesus; and he was puzzled, because some people were saying that John had risen from the dead, others that Elijah had reappeared, still others that one of the ancient prophets had come back to life. But Herod said, ‘John? I beheaded him. So who is this I hear such reports about?’ And he was anxious to see Jesus.