Friday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

September 1, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/090123.cfm

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Paul instructs the Thessalonians on how to live a good Christian life. His teaching is strung on the tones of his time, and may fall a bit askew on our ears.

Reading Paul’s words today, I was immediately reminded of a report I read yesterday about Pope Francis’s visit with his Jesuit brothers in Portugal.

The Pope expressed his concern about what he terms “backwardism”, the intent to oppose any change in Church teaching. He said that “backwardism is useless, and it is necessary to understand that there is a correct evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals.”

Today’s reading offers us a good example of how we adapt our understanding of scripture according to advances in learning and the sciences.

The image of a man “acquiring” a wife for himself carries an objectification of women intolerable to a developed 21st century mind. Does that mean the teaching is invalid for us?

No. It simply alerts us that we must read all scripture with the understanding of enlightened Church teaching. The essence of this passage from Paul is not the instruction on how one finds a life companion. The essence is the call to holiness which never changes.

This is the will of God, your holiness.

The role of the Pope is to lead the Church in understanding the Word of God for or time. When asked for modern examples of these developing teachings, Francis cited these:

“Today it is a sin to possess atomic bombs; the death penalty is a sin, it cannot can be practiced, and it was not so before,” he said. “As for slavery, some pontiffs before me have tolerated it, but things are different today.”

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I found inspiration in the Pope’s continued explanation:

Francis went on to point to the writings of the fifth century monk, Vincent of Lérins, who taught that doctrine “may be consolidated by years, expanded by time, exalted by age.”

Change develops from the root upward, growing with these three criteria,” the pope told the Jesuits, noting that Lérins knew that the understanding of the human person is deepened with the passage of time.

The other sciences and their evolution also help the church in this growth in understanding,” Francis said. “The view of church doctrine as a monolith is wrong.”

from NCR: Christopher White, 8/28/2023

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Unfortunately, not all those charged with leadership and teaching exercise their role with this holy freedom. Fear, ignorance, greediness, and a lust for power can lurk behind even the most exalted title.

As today’s Gospel indicates, it takes great vigilance to remain ready for God. Over centuries for the Church, and over a lifetime for each of us, we must continue to fill our lamps with refreshed and deeper perceptions of God’s ever-unfolding, infinite Wisdom.

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Prose: about St. Augustine

You may have heard this legend, written in the Middle Ages, by Jacobus de Voragine. I remember a book similar to the one below which you too might have seen as a child recounting legends of the saints.

St. Augustine spent 30 years writing his brilliant treatise “De Trinitate”. He never completed it.

Early in the process, as the story goes, Augustine was pondering along the seashore. He saw a young boy industriously running from the ocean back to a small hole dug in the sand. Each time the boy carried a shell full of water to the hole.

When asked, he told Augustine that he was trying to transfer the entire ocean to the hole. When Augustine assured him that that was an impossible task, the child responded, “It would be easier and quicker to draw all the water out of the sea and fit it into this hole than for you to fit the mystery of the Trinity and His Divinity into your little intellect; for the Mystery of the Trinity is greater and larger in comparison with your intelligence than is this vast ocean in comparison with this little hole.”

So saying, the little boy vanished.

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Music: Fill Us with Your Love