Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 19, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071924.cfm

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Isaiah answered King Hezekiah:
“This will be the sign for you from the LORD
that he will do what he has promised:
See, I will make the shadow cast by the sun
on the stairway to the terrace of Ahaz
go back the ten steps it has advanced.”
So the sun came back the ten steps it had advanced.
Isaiah 38:7-8

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Walter Brueggemann, writing about this passage from Isaiah, entitles the chapter “Faithful King, Faithful God“. Hezekiah was a good king, observant of the David Covenant and of God’s commands. When Hezekiah lay in the shadow of death, that faithful relationship remained true.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We realize that life is a series of lights and shadows. And God is faithful in each circumstance. Catherine McAuley put it this way:

Let’s listen for God’s faithful presence in our lives, whether at this moment we are in light or shadow.

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Poetry: Shadows by D.H. Lawrence

And if to-night my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then shall I know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon’s in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding, folding
around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal.

And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me,
then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

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Music: Only a Shadow – Carey Landry, sung by Sean DeBurca at the beautiful Galway Cathedral

I love the way Sean plays the piano in this video.