14 Dec
Fri
2nd Week in Advent
St John of the Cross, priest & doctor
Is. 48:17-19
Ps. 1:1-4, 6
Mt. 11:16-19
How To Pray With Shalom
Home Page of Shalom
Index of This Month
 

It is very easy for us to make up our minds where God is to be found. How often we try to make him fit our ideas, our convenience rather than his loving Truth! In the Gospel today Jesus chides the crowds for their fickleness. He feels like those children who provide music for passers-by. If the music is joyful, they won't dance; if the music is sad, they will not cry. And he applies the image to the way people reacted to John the Baptist and himself. John led a life of great austerity and he was not accepted. Jesus comes socialising with sinners, eating and drinking with them, and they are shocked. But, as Isaiah reminds us today, our true happiness is not in making God's ways fit ours but in our making God's ways our own. It was Paul who was scolded by Jesus for 'kicking against the goad'. Once he submitted entirely to the Way of Jesus, his life was transformed. His love for Jesus became so great that he could not decide which was better: to be alive and working for Jesus or to die and be united with him in eternal happiness. We too will only find true freedom and happiness when the only thing we want is to be in total harmony with God's will in our lives.



Lord, help me to make Your will the only thing I want in life.

DAILY OFFERING
Eternal Father, I offer You everything I do this day; my thoughts, words, joys and sufferings. Grant that, vivified by the Holy Spirit and united to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, my life this day may be of service to You and to others. I also pray that all those preparing for marriage discover in Sacrament the source of Christ's grace for living a fithful and fruitful love. Amen.

PRAYING WITH THE CHURCH
INTENTION
That Christians may free themselves from the subtle forms of cultural conditioning which prevent them from recognising the dignity and rights of others
Elaboration

- END -









P R A Y I N G    W I T H    T H E    C H U R C H    

INTENTION : That Christians may free themselves from the subtle forms of cultural conditioning which prevent them from recognising the dignity and rights of others

Our vocation and mission as Christians is to bring the light of Christ to the world in order to preserve the world from corruption by permeating it with the values of the Gospel. We need, ourselves, first and foremost to be enlightened by Christ. We do not generate light, we only refract, reflect and radiate. It is His light that we must cast on the world. The more transparent our lives are with the values of the Gospel, the better is the light of Christ reflected and the less we are seen.

The world in which we live is mixed with wheat and weeds. There is good and evil. Consumerism is but the logical sequence of a materialistic way of life. Spiritual values are forgotten. Our wants are made to appear as our needs and we are forced to get so immersed in the joys of this world as to forget the joys of the world to come. We are admonished to be aware lest we be trapped by these and other forms of cultural conditioning that mark this world.

Awareness is the first step to change. We pray that this awareness may help us to be delivered from the cultural conditioning that hinders and hampers our vision and prevents us from recognising the dignity and the rights of others.




- END -