Wednesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time
August 30, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/083023.cfm

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings present us with a stark contrast.

Paul describes a community that has not only “heard” the Word but has allowed it to transform them:

And for this reason we too give thanks to God unceasingly,
that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us,
you received it not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God,
which is now at work in you who believe.

In contrast, Jesus delivers another blast of “woes” to the scribes and Pharisees whose “faith” is a pretense which hides a dead heart:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.
Even so, on the outside you appear righteous,
but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.

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The readings inspire me to ask myself this question:

If I put my faith under a stethoscope,
would it have a heartbeat?

I think back over my life and consider how the faith came to me. How did I begin to “hear” in the way that Paul describes?

Many of us began that “hearing” in faithful families, parishes, and schools where we learned stories that we loved and wanted to imitate. We saw faith lived out in the lives of those teachers and we were inspired to become like them.

Others of us came to the faith by a more circuitous route – perhaps, by some blessed experiential conversion that brought us face-to-face with the Holy.

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In whatever ways the Word has spoken to us, and continues to speak, the question for us is always this:

Do we hear the Holy with our own hearts?

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When a doctor or nurse holds a stethoscope to our chests, both we and they are quiet so that the heartbeat can be heard. So too when we listen for our “faith-beat”. We must settle down and let ourselves rest in God’s Silence. The Spirit will lead us to hear the graces pulsing at the core of our lives.

Sometimes the sound is strong, and we can rest in it with joyful satisfaction. But there are times when the beat is hard to discern because it is buried under life’s pressures and twists. We might find ourselves pressed down and entangled rather than Light-hearted with God.

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Finding deep freedom in our spiritual life requires our attention. If we don’t nurture our souls, they will end up like that lonely plant on the windowsill about which we say, “Oh, I’ll water you later”, but later never comes!

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Prose: John of the Cross offers two pieces of advice that may help us to free ourselves from those pressures and entanglements that inhibit our spiritual deepening:

Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in living life sufferings for the Beloved. The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of Divine union. For whether it be a strong wire rope or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not, if it really holds it fast; for until the cord be broken, the bird cannot fly.

However softly we speak, God is so close to us that he can hear us; nor do we need wings to go in search of him, but merely to seek solitude and contemplate him within ourselves, without being surprised to find such a good Guest there.

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Music: Tender Hearted – Jeanne Cotter