Tuesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s opening prayer today is a good place to begin:
Father of love, hear our prayers. Help us to know your will and to do it with courage and faith.
Our faith is in the Risen Christ, present and at work in our midst and within us. His courage comes from his gift of the Holy Spirit.
Our task is to ask for that gift and accept it when we are given it. To ask:
- For an increase of faith: ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!’
- For an increased awareness of those times when God is giving me actual graces so that I might take hold of them and act courageously.
The Risen Christ is in our midst so that we can act with His power and against the power of Satan. Scripture tells us that He came to destroy the power of Satan, who is the father of lies.
Two lies which Christ wants us to confront and Satan does not are these:
- Things can be relied upon.
- The goal of life is becoming somebody in the eyes of others rather than God’s.
As to the first lie, I found its confrontation expressed in a parish bulletin of St. Mary’s Church in St. Joseph, Missouri: “Resist the temptation to use shopping as recreation. Let God fill your life instead of cluttering it with more objects.”
As for the second, I found its confrontation expressed in something a retreat master said to the students here: “It is a great asceticism not to be angry at ourselves for our limitations.”
Father of love, hear our prayers. Help us to know your will and to do it with courage and faith.
Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB
Posted in Articles for Ordinary Time, Daily Reflections