Let your face shine on your servant;
and teach me your decrees. PS 118:135
WISDOM 9:13-18
My Soul's Beloved,
God has loved us from all eternity, and from all eternity He willed that we would be His. This is the mind of God, and the Heart of God, and these intentions He has made known to us from the beginning when Adam and Eve willfully challenged Him and desired to grasp what was not theirs to grasp - equality with God. Who can fly in the Face of the Almighty and hope to live? Who are we, Lord, but mere dust and dependent on God for every breath we breathe? Yet, we constantly spurn Him, spurn His love, deliberately, willfully, and purposefully turn away from Him and choose to do what He has expressly forbidden us to do, things that will destroy us and rob us of our eternal inheritance.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, You have made visible and tangible to all who desire to know God, for You have come into the world and made His love, His power, and His wisdom evident and palpable to us. But if we spurn You, Lord, if we like our first parents seek all the desires of the human heart apart from You, then all we will experience are sickness, sorrow, loneliness, grief, separation, and death.
But to all who call You, even with the last ounce of breath in their body, You will save and make Yourself known in all Your goodness, sweetness, and loveliness. You came for the sick, for the wounded, for the lost, for the poor and the needy, and these, O Lord, will always find a home and refuge in You. We need to do nothing except receive all that You desire to give, which is nothing less than perfect joy and eternal rest in the Kingdom of God.
What man indeed can know the intentions of God?
Who can divine the will of the Lord?
The reasonings of mortals are unsure
and our intentions unstable;
for a perishable body presses down the soul,
and this tent of clay weighs down the teeming mind.
It is hard enough for us to work out what is on earth,
laborious to know what lies within our reach;
who, then, can discover what is in the heavens?
As for your intention, who could have learnt it, had you not granted Wisdom
and sent your holy spirit from above?
Thus have the paths of those on earth been straightened
and men been taught what pleases you,
and saved, by Wisdom.
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.
PHILEMON 9-10,12-17
My Soul's Beloved,
My Soul's Beloved,
How tenderly and persuasively Paul writes to his friend and brother in You, Philemon, regarding a slave that belonged to him. He is now living with Paul while he is in chains in Rome for the sake of the Gospel, but he wants to send him back to the man who was once his master and owner.
This letter can also be read as if written by You, O Lord, pleading with the Father to take us back for Your sake. We are now grafted to You. We are members of Your Body and belong to the Church which You instituted and are its Cornerstone with Peter as the Rock on which it is built. We who once were slaves are slaves no more, for we have been ransomed by the Power of the Blood of the Lamb. Our poor, unworthy lives and souls are now redeemed by Your death, and we are raised to new life in You by Your glorious resurrection. We, too, now, for Your sake, return to the Father, not as slaves, but as children and co-heirs to the Kingdom of God. Thank You, Lord.
This is Paul writing, an old man now and, what is more, still a prisoner of Christ Jesus. I am appealing to you for a child of mine, whose father I became while wearing these chains: I mean Onesimus. I am sending him back to you, and with him – I could say – a part of my own self. I should have liked to keep him with me; he could have been a substitute for you, to help me while I am in the chains that the Good News has brought me. However, I did not want to do anything without your consent; it would have been forcing your act of kindness, which should be spontaneous. I know you have been deprived of Onesimus for a time, but it was only so that you could have him back for ever, not as a slave any more, but something much better than a slave, a dear brother; especially dear to me, but how much more to you, as a blood-brother as well as a brother in the Lord. So if all that we have in common means anything to you, welcome him as you would me.
LUKE 14:25-33
My Soul's Beloved,
One of the most well-known converts to Catholicism G. K. Chesterton has famously said, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult; and left untried," God is not interested in half-measures, the prize and the goal is heaven and it is not offered to us as servants and slaves but as Your sisters and brothers, as co-heirs with You, for we, in You, are now the children of God. The prize is great, and so was the price paid by the Son of God, so we could receive it.
To love anyone or anything more than we love God is to break the first and foremost of all the commandments, and when we do, we have lost all worth having in life and in death, definitively and comprehensively. You have said that the first and greatest commandment is to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." Anything that we place, whether it be people or possessions, before love of God makes us guilty of idolatry. Hence, You put this unvarnished truth, ‘If any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes, and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple. Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.’
Beloved, while walking the narrow way and choosing the difficult road is hard and we are to do it daily, moment by moment, one step at a time, we are not alone. You are yoked to us, and You walk beside us. Your Holy Spirit abiding in us, providing all the grace and strength necessary in our pilgrim journey from earth to heaven. You accompany us every step of the way if we will only invite You to, and You will remain with us as we walk our own personal Calvary and Gethsemane. Our eternal reward will be to receive the inheritance prepared for us in His Kingdom, from all eternity.
Beloved, You never said it would be easy. We have to only gaze at the Crucifix and meditate on Your life, passion, and death to know the cost of following You closely. But oh, the glorious and eternal reward, O Lord, is so worth it. I beg You to stay with me, do not abandon me, and accompany not just me but all those I love so well and pray for with tears daily, so someday, where You are, we all may be.
Great crowds accompanied Jesus on his way and he turned and spoke to them. ‘If any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple. Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.
‘And indeed, which of you here, intending to build a tower, would not first sit down and work out the cost to see if he had enough to complete it? Otherwise, if he laid the foundation and then found himself unable to finish the work, the onlookers would all start making fun of him and saying, “Here is a man who started to build and was unable to finish.” Or again, what king marching to war against another king would not first sit down and consider whether with ten thousand men he could stand up to the other who advanced against him with twenty thousand? If not, then while the other king was still a long way off, he would send envoys to sue for peace. So in the same way, none of you can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.’
‘And indeed, which of you here, intending to build a tower, would not first sit down and work out the cost to see if he had enough to complete it? Otherwise, if he laid the foundation and then found himself unable to finish the work, the onlookers would all start making fun of him and saying, “Here is a man who started to build and was unable to finish.” Or again, what king marching to war against another king would not first sit down and consider whether with ten thousand men he could stand up to the other who advanced against him with twenty thousand? If not, then while the other king was still a long way off, he would send envoys to sue for peace. So in the same way, none of you can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.’
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