Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
October 26, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102624.cfm

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Brothers and sisters:
Grace was given to each of us
according to the measure of Christ’s gift…

… living the truth in love,
we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ,
from whom the whole Body,
joined and held together by every supporting ligament,
with the proper functioning of each part,
brings about the Body’s growth and builds itself up in love.
 living the truth in love,
we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ,
from whom the whole Body,
joined and held together by every supporting ligament,
with the proper functioning of each part,
brings about the Body’s growth and builds itself up in love.
Ephesians 4:7;15-16

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There is a grace, inherent in each of us, that can make us physically, spiritually, and emotionally elegant. Some people move, speak, write, and behave with grace. It is a natural gift that may be enhanced by our openness to God’s gentle power in our lives.

But there is another kind of infinite grace that is a pure gift from God. When we receive such grace, we receive a share in God’s own life.

Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of Uncreated Grace in human form, that gift of eternal, inexhaustible Love which invites our full surrender to its transformative power.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
God’s Love for us is so vast as to be incomprehensibe. Like a star in the seemingly distant heavens, it still touches us with its light, still donates its stardust to our body.
We pray to be grateful, open, awed, and obedient to its urging in our lives.

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Poetry: That Lives in Us -Rumi (interpreted by David Ladinsky)

If you put your hands on this oar with me,
they will never harm another, and they will come to find
they hold everything you want.
If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer
lift anything to your
mouth that might wound your precious land-
that sacred earth that is
your body.
If you put your soul against this oar with me,
the power that made the universe will enter your sinew
from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm
that lives in us.
Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give.
Why lay yourself on the torturer’s rack of the past and future?
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no rest.
Be kind to yourself, dear- to our innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.
If you put your heart against the earth with me, in serving
every creature, our Beloved will enter you from our sacred realm
and we will be, we will be
so happy.

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Music: This Ancient – Carolyn McDade