Saturday of the Third Week of Lent
March 9, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/030924.cfm

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Your piety is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that early passes away.

Hosea 6:4

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… the tax collector stood off at a distance
and would not even raise his eyes to heaven
but beat his breast and prayed,
‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’
I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former;
for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Luke 18: 13-14

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I think the word “Piety” has taken on a rather saccharine connotation because we mistake it for an overly sentimental, and sometimes insincere, devotion. However, the word piety comes from the Latin word pietas, the noun form of the adjective pius (which means “devout” or “dutiful”).

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:

Picture Michelangelo’s Pieta. Let yourself feel the emotion captured in the heart of that sculpture. That is pietas/piety – a deep, penetrating presence and love that cannot fully be put into words. A humble, sincere prayer like that of the tax collector is the fruit of such piety.

Most of us are not great sinners. We just make some mean – and perhaps continual – choices that can block the flow of grace into our hearts. God stands beside us as we make such choices, ready to hear us when we turn and ask for the Mercy that will free and deepen us.

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Prose: from Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, essays, narratives, and poems.
By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times.

From the quote below, Huxley obviously had strong opinions about religion but especially about false piety. Although Jesus would never have put it this way, the sentiments echo those in today’s readings.

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“In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don’t therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don’t feel. If you do, you become one of those idiotic music-snobs … unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. 

It’s exactly the same with God. The world’s full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren’t really alive, who’ve never done any vital act, who aren’t in any living relation with anything; people who haven’t the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God. 

Just a pack of God-snobs. They’re as grotesque and contemptible as the music-snobs … but nobody has the sense to say so. The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious and Christian. When they’re merely dead and ought to be having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to make them sit up and come to life.”