Tag: Baruch

A Scriptural Banquet

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Advent, Faith, Psalms, Scripture, spirituality1 Comment

December 5, 2021
Second Sunday of Advent

Today’s Readings

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Baruch, Paul, Luke (channeling Isaiah), and Psalm 126. The passages given us are rich, lyrical, joyful and profound.

The Lord has done great things for us;
we are filled with joy.

Psalm 126:3

For this whole coming week, we are invited to a scriptural banquet – the table set with  preciously familiar Advent phrases to, once again, enrich and challenge our hearts.

Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery;
    put on the splendor of glory from God forever…

Baruch 5:1

I am confident of this,
that the one who began a good work in you
will continue to complete it 
until the day of Christ Jesus.

Philippians 1:6

A voice of one crying out in the desert:
    “Prepare the way of the Lord,
        make straight his paths.
    Every valley shall be filled
        and every mountain and hill shall be made low.
    The winding roads shall be made straight,
        and the rough ways made smooth,
    and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Luke 3: 4-6

As with any banquet, we can approach this richness by taking a little bit of every offering, or we might prefer to fill up on one inspiration that particularly speaks to us at this moment in our lives.

  • Is there a misery we long to have lifted from our shoulders?
  • Is there a confidence and strength we seek from God?
  • Is there a sacred voice we need to hear, 
  • a crooked way needing straightening, 
  • an emptiness to be filled, 
  • an insurmountable challenge to be faced, 
  • a roughness to be smoothed?

Whatever our situation, by placing our needs faithfully before the promise of Advent, we will find the healing, hope, and grace we need.

Let these magnificent words seep into your heart to ready it for the promised salvation. For it is Advent – and

God is leading Israel in joy
    by the light of Divine Glory,
    with mercy and justice for company.

Baruch 5:9

Prose: from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.


Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God can say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Music: Starlight through Barren Branches – Joel Clarkson

Names Written in Heaven

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Discipleship, Eternal Life, Faith, Gospel, Jesus, repentance, spirituality1 Comment

Saturday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time

October 5, 2019

Click here for readings

Today, in Mercy, we read from the Book of Baruch, a little book with a big punch. Baruch authored “scribal literature”, that which completed the message of another writer. Baruch was Jeremiah’s scribe, working to finish the edges of this most complex of the prophets.

Our reading today reflects this complexity. The Israelites have a history of intertwined faith and faithlessness. They also have current overwhelming sufferings. How does the prophet employ these two realities to impel hearts toward God?

Baruch characterizes God as angry and vengeful, punishing the people for their idolatry. It’s a model that works for Baruch’s time and purposes. But it’s not the God I know and love. So how can the passage speak to me?

The core of Baruch’s message is that things can be really bad sometimes in life, but that God is with us even in those times. Our turning to God in trust and patience will allow us to remain faithful and to deepen spiritually even in suffering. That fidelity brings joy and peace.

It’s hard to have that kind of faith. We want to manage our lives, and even manage God, in order to make sense of the chaos of life – to provide sensible, rectifiable reasons for suffering and evil.

We want to control demons like the early disciples did.

lk10_20 name_heaven

In our Gospel, these disciples return from their missionary trips all puffed up with their powers over evil. Jesus cautions them saying that’s not at all what it’s all about. Any miraculous power they have in a given moment is only a sign of a Greatness beyond them. 

Instead, their names a written in Heaven by the long, unshakeable fidelity that comes with keeping their eyes on God; by giving themselves to the mysterious, sometimes hidden, presence of God in every reality; by allowing that Presence to transform them and their circumstances.

(Speaking of prophets, a beautiful poem, Advice to a Prophet, came across my email today thanks to Joe Riley at Panhala. The poem is fitting as we close this Season of Creation. I will include it in a second post in case you’d like to read it.)

Music:  a little revival music today, New Name Written Down in Glory. Picture the disciples singing this after Jesus instructs them in today’s Gospel.