Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 25, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082524.cfm

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Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe
and the one who would betray him. 
And he said,
“For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me
unless it is granted him by my Father.”

As a result of this,
many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him.
Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” 
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? 
You have the words of eternal life. 
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
John 6:64-69

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In the name of the disciples, Peter proclaims their absolute faith in Jesus as the Messiah. It is a challenge to ask ourselves if our faith is absolute or conditional. Do we believe only when things work out as we wish? Or can God depend on us, and we depend on God, no matter the “weather”?

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We pray for an ever stronger faith and give thanks for its gift to us.

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Poetry: Prayer – Jessica Powers

Prayer is the trapdoor out of sin.
Prayer is a mystic entering in
to secret places full of light.
It is a passage through the night.
Heaven is reached, the blessed say,
by prayer and by no other way.
One may kneel down and make a plea
with words from book or breviary,
or one may enter in and find
a homemade message in the mind.
But true prayer travels further still,
to seek God’s presence and God’s will. 

To pray can be to push a door
and snatch some crumbs of evermore,
or (likelier by far) to wait,
head bowed, before a fastened gate,
helpless and miserable and dumb,
yet hopeful that the Lord will come.
Here is the prayer of grace and good
most proper to our creaturehood.
God’s window shows his humble one
more to the likeness of His Son.
He sees, though thought and senses stray,
the will is resolute to stay
and feed, in weathers sweet or grim,
on any word that speaks of Him. 

He beams on the humility
that keeps its peace in misery
and, save for glimmerings, never knows
how beautiful with light it grows.
He smiles on faith that seems to know
it has no other place to go. 

But some day, hidden by His will,
if this meek child is waiting still,
God will take out His mercy-key
and open up felicity,
where saltiest tears are given right
to seas where sapphire marries light,
where by each woe the soul can span
new orbits for the utter man,
where even the flesh, so seldom prized,
would blind the less than divinized.

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Music: To Whom Shall We Go – Carolyn Arends