Friday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 8, 2022
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070822.cfm
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our Alleluia Verse makes an amazing promise.
Alleluia, alleluia.
When the Spirit of truth comes,
you will be guided to all truth
and reminded of all I told you.
John 16:13-14
We will be guided and re-minded by the Spirit of God! We will have a refreshed mind and sense of sacred purpose!
Perhaps like Hosea’s community, we have been exhausted, “collapsed” from a lack of grace and spiritual vitality. The lack may be within or around us, from our own negligence or from a world too heavy with evil. But Hosea proclaims that, if we turn to God with our “words” – our prayer – God will respond:
I will be like the dew for my beloved:
Hosea 14: 6-7
who shall blossom like the lily;
who shall strike root like the Lebanon cedar,
and put forth abundant shoots.
My dear one’s splendor shall be like the olive tree
with a fragrance like the Lebanon cedar.
Jesus continues and fulfills that promise in his own time and in ours. We live in a world still plagued by the sinfulness Jesus describes for his disciples in today’s Gospel. It is an overwhelming darkness at times and we can become heavy with it. We may feel we have no strength to stand against it, nor words to speak for change.
Jesus assures us that the refreshing “dew” of Hosea is abundantly available to us through our life in the Holy Spirit.
Do not worry about how you are to speak
Matthew 10:19-20
or what you are to say.
You will be given at that moment what you are to say.
For it will not be you who speak
but the Spirit of your God speaking through you.
Let’s not take that amazing gift and promise for granted. Let’s not fail to believe that the Spirit of Truth is with us to guide and remind us of our immense power for good.
Poetry: The World Is Too Much With Us – William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Music: Like the Dewfall – Mike Stanley
Lavish Mercy 