October 13th, 2024 – Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Happy Sunday!
What is our goal? Here in October, we are quickly approaching the end of Ordinary Time in the church’s calendar. It allows us the opportunity to reflect on our purpose in life. Through our baptism we have a desire for heaven, and we do everything we can to help on this journey to heaven.
Today’s Gospel challenges us to be detached from worldly possessions. We can own things and have possessions, but we should never put those things above God. Furthermore, how would you feel about losing all your possessions? Would you be devastated? Or are you able to be fully attached to God that you could continue to live your life for God? Our goal is detachment from material goods so that we can be attached to God.
God is the one who can help us through the most challenging times in our lives. When we are attached to our
possessions, we tend to forget to rely on God in difficult times. What is keeping you from fully relying on God? Is there anything you can do to detach yourself from this world to help prepare your soul for the next? I encourage you to pray about detachment this week.
God Bless,
Fr. Joseph
October 6th, 2024 – Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Dear friends,Last Tuesday, October 1, we celebrated the memorial of Thérèse of the Child Jesus.
Saint Thérèse is also known as the “Little Flower” and the teacher of the Little Way. In a world that promotes visibility, influence, and power as the meters of success and a “good life,” we celebrate a little one who did not spare words to speak about her own “littleness”. She once said, “BECAUSE I was little and weak, Jesus stooped down to me and tenderly instructed me in the secrets of His Love.”
What, then, led saint Thérèse to holiness? The grace of God, of course, and her great trust and faith in the Lord who casts down the mighty from thrones and lifts up the lowly (cf. Luke 1:52).
In the Gospels, we often hear the Lord speak about the little ones. The Lord once equated himself with them when he said, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40) and elsewhere he actually asked of his disciples: “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3.)
The Little Way is by no means the way of childishness. Rather, it is a concrete way of taking up one’s own cross to follow the Lord. In ancient Israel children were “invisible,” with very few rights if any at all. When the Lord invites his disciples to become like little children, his invitation is to be willing to become invisible, the opposite of the power and influence that characterize the aspirations of many in our society today.
Saint Thérèse knows that the Little Way is narrow and it needs to be paved by the offering up of the daily sacrifices that so often come our way. As she herself says, “Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.”
May Thérèse’s intercession obtain for us the grace to know how to walk the Little Way that leads to salvation.
