Monday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
How does the believer touch Jesus in our times?
There are two indicators in this question that lead us in the direction of an answer.
The first is the word, “believer.” One has to be a believer, he or she must have faith!
Yet there is more to it than simply stating that touching Jesus requires faith, as if that act of belief required minimal attention or effort.
The second indicator is the phrase, “in our times”. The times we have been given to live in are heavy with the need for proof – seeing with our eyes or touching with our hands, the evidence that God is acting in our lives. The touch-button existence to which we have grown accustomed makes it harder for us to believe. We’re accustomed to instantly seeing and hearing and almost touching, by reason of media use.
The act of faith requires more than minimal attention or effort. In explanation of this, I refer to something in a sermon by St. John Henry Newman:
“Let us then put aside vain excuses; and, instead of looking for outward events to change our course of life, be sure of this, that if our course of life is to be changed, it must be from within. God’s grace moves us from within, so does our own will. External circumstances have no real power over us. If we do not love God, it is because we have not wished to love Him, tried to love Him, prayed to love Him. We have not borne the idea and the wish in our mind day by day, we have not had it before us in the little matters of the day, we have not lamented that we loved Him not, we have been too indolent, sluggish, carnal, to attempt to love Him in little things, and begin at the beginning; we have shrunk from the effort of moving from within; we have been like persons who cannot get themselves to rise in the morning; and we have desired and waited for a thing impossible,—to be changed once and for all, all at once, by some great excitement from without, or some great event, or some special season; something or other we go on expecting, which is to change us without our having the trouble to change ourselves.”
Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB
Posted in Articles for Ordinary Time, Daily Reflections