Wednesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
October 25, 2023
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102523.cfm
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Paul and Jesus both instruct and challenge their listeners and us.
… thanks be to God that, although you were once slaves of sin,
Romans 6:17
you have become obedient from the heart
to the pattern of teaching to which you were entrusted.
Freed from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness.
Paul wants us to understand that, through our Baptism, we are living in a whole new power for goodness and grace. The world may look the same as it did before we belonged to Christ, but it isn’t.
To use a phrase from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins,
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
If we see with the new eyes of grace, we will be able to respond to Jesus’s challenge:
Stay awake!
Matthew 24:42
For you do not know when the Son of Man will come.
Stay awake. See the world and your life as they truly are – places where God awaits you in every moment. Incline your heart to listen lovingly to the sound of the Holy Spirit in your life. That obedient heart is precious to God!
Poetry: Immersion – Denise Levertov
There is anger abroad in the world, a numb thunder,
because of God’s silence. But how naïve,
to keep wanting words we could speak ourselves,
English, Urdu, Tagalog, the French of Tours, the French of Haiti…
Yes, that was one way omnipotence chose
to address us—Hebrew, Aramaic, or whatever the patriarchs
chose in their turn to call what they heard. Moses
demanded the word, spoken and written. But perfect freedom
assured other ways of speech. God is surely
patiently trying to immerse us in a different language,
events of grace, horrifying scrolls of history
and the unearned retrieval of blessings lost for ever,
the poor grass returning after drought, timid, persistent.
God’s abstention is only from human dialects. The holy voice
utters its woe and glory in myriad musics, in signs and portents.
Our own words are for us to speak, a way to ask and to answer.
Music: Speak, O Lord – Kristyn Getty
Lavish Mercy 
Would you please send me these daily reflections. Thank you
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