Monday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
“Proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes again.”
Every now and then one comes across someone, who is not of our own, who disarms our smugness as a believer. The centurion in today’s Gospel is such an example. Such a disarming experience need not alarm our faith. It should, rather, arm our faith with a new, deeper hold on it.
Our Fr. Hugh Tasch was accustomed to translating the Latin adage, “Cotidianna velescunt” as, What we do daily, we do dully! In other words, as applying to our faith, we take things for granted. Yet routine can lull us into a reliance on externals to the avoidance of interior graces. The well-intentioned Jews in our Gospel were very aware of what the centurion had done for them in providing the synagogue. It’s a little reminder that we can sit in the shadows of the institution—the Church or whatever—in the hopes that its glow and glitter will encompass us and we won’t have to engage!
Surely the institutional aspects of our lives are necessary and helpful, yet like fences that set out the pasture in which the sheep graze, we must do the ‘grazing’ ourselves. We ‘graze’ when we engage our lives by prayer and reflection, so as to learn Christ’s dying and rising in us, dying to selfishness, and rising to the charity of Christ.
Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB
Posted in Articles for Ordinary Time, Daily Reflections