Sunday, October 3, 2010
^ Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C ) ; 3rd week of the Psalter
Liturgical Color: Green
Saint of the Day: BROGNE San Gerardo, Abate
Noble Lomacensis, Gerardo, a very young age, had been seized by a great religious ideal. After an initiation into monastic life at Saint-Denis, near Paris, had founded a Benedictine abbey in their lands. Monaco exemplary and virtuous man, well known by the powerful families of the regions close to his monastery, soon attracted the attention of the principles, especially Gisleberto of Lorraine and Arnaldo of Flanders who called to revive their fallen monasteries. Indefatigable apostle, Gerardo traveled for twenty-five years, Lorraine and Flanders reforming a dozen abbeys. He died in 959 at Brogne. The Shrine dates back to 1131 and to Geraldine Brogne, today Saint-Gérard, quickly became a place of pilgrimage. The saint's feast day is celebrated in the diocese of Namur, Liege and Ghent. Relics, regarded as genuine, are preserved at Saint-Gérard (rectory and convent of the Assumption), to Maredsous (Abbey), Aubange (parish house) and Ghent (Notre Dame). (Future)
Etymology: Gerardo = brave with a spear, German
Emblem: pastoral staff
Martyrology: In the area of \u200b\u200bNamur, Belgium in today, St. Gerard, the first abbot of the monastery he founded Brogne, who worked for the restoration of monastic discipline in Flanders and Lorraine, and many monasteries back to the original observance of the rule.
LITURGY OF THE DAY
First reading
Responsorial Psalm
Hear now the voice of the Lord.
Second reading
Gospel
+ From the Gospel according to Luke
At that time, the apostles said to the Lord "Increase in us faith, " .
The Lord replied, "If you had faith as a mustard seed you could say to this mulberry tree
" uprooted and planted in the sea to go, "and it would obey.
Those of you having a servant plowing or keeping sheep, will say when he returns from the field, 'Come immediately and sit at the table "? He did not say rather: "Prepare to eat, the clothes cling to the sides and sérvimi, as long as I ate and drank, and after you eat and drink? Will perhaps gratitude to that servant because he has run the orders?
So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say: "We are useless servants. We have done what was " .
Word of the Lord
REFLECTION (Antonio Solmona)
Way on Sundays in Ordinary Time continue with the good company of the Gospel of Luke, which will take us up to Christ the King Sunday (November) then to leave the pitch to the Gospel of Mark. (In the Gospel, I highlighted the parts of different colors we're going to expand on, and pray that this, like everyone, is a passage from the Gospel must become prayer) .
Luca a good painter, makes us enter into his works of literary art, and presents us with the Lord once again speaks of faith. This time, though not on its own initiative, but urged by his followers.
"Increase our faith!"
This is the urgent request of his disciples, of those men who had left everything to follow this man appeared from nowhere, which until then had given him confidence that other nights of the cold, whole days of arduous journey and many times skipped lunch or dinner because they do not There was a shadow of a piece of bread.
Perhaps many difficulties experienced by the disciples feel that undermines the confidence in this man, maybe they were tempted to say "Sir, your company is not for us," and at the first opportunity to run back home, their sons, their wives, their safe and warm bed.
In the Gospels we often find the invocation to increase faith, which always comes out of the mouth and heart of people who have a history different, a different life, a different social status.
This means that there is a person in the world that can boast of possessing the true faith!
All, more or less, we are traveling and constantly growing and we are looking for a faith sincere, simple, humble, without unnecessary frills that only serve to beautify and not to improve.
How many times in our spiritual life we \u200b\u200brepeat the Lord, "Increase our faith Jesus, we need it." The life of all and made of ups and downs, problems that seem insurmountable and that seems to overwhelm us and it is then that our faith collapses. All the certainties on which to base our loans are not, I'll see you miss the ground from under their feet and cry out loud, just like Peter, who is drowning in the lake, "Lord save me, I will not die." But perhaps the Lord at that time seems too far away and unreachable, and then we cease to trust Him even in sadness, anguish, we give up and we destroy the soul.
Ultimately it derives from the word trust? Just by Faith! And if we lose our trust in Jesus, we will not collect more anything good from our lives.
We never stop to cry out to God our need for help, we never stop to confide in him, we never lose faith in Jesus, in his very presence and supreme power, remain anchored to him, sure that sooner or then the Lord will tend a hand, just as he did with Peter just before he drowned. The Lord, in the trials of our life is there ready to pull us out of the water when it seems to us too late. It's just a matter of trust!
If you have faith as a grain mustard
The Lord does not pretend to a faith that is immense, endless, almost unimaginable, and the Lord is satisfied with little, than a grain of mustard seed that among all existing as small and delicate. gaze of Jesus is not laying on the size of our faith, but on the quality of it. We do not need the sight of God to be able to really perform wonders visible to men, but what matters to him is how and when the miracles happen in our lives, our souls and also to what extent they are.
The Lord urges us not so much to raise volume of our faith, how to improve it, to make him even more than that confidence in service to others, so we really only capable of uprooting trees and have them circling over the sea at our command, not by magic of course!
Although our faith is a minor but genuine, sincere, we live to work miracles in the lives of our brothers, not just ours.
The miracles of which I speak are not physical healing, spiritual miracles, but miracles of love, gratitude and affection towards each other. Only when we reached true maturity of faith we see the bridges of indifference and maybe even hate someone to an end, insurmountable mountain of problems and misunderstandings plane, wrong way taken lightly become just and holy ones that lead us to the heart of God
" We are useless servants. We have done what was "
A word that seems to contradict other passages in the Gospel, which surprises us with the word" useless ". Useless in Italian means is useless, incapable. But this is not the original sense of the word: servants not so much useless, but do not expect a profit, not looking for an advantage; servants without pretensions or claims, or ulterior motives that have nothing if you do not need to be themselves, acting without a purpose that is not the one motivation of love. If faith is not accompanied by good and holy works, we can avoid the struggle to heal our little grain of mustard.
What really makes the quality of faith is precisely the totally expended, over time we have available, for others.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who need us most, whether they are elderly, sick, lonely people, children and children, youth, married couples, entire families. There is no need to aim too high to shoot our desire to work, look around and notice the needs of the people we encounter in our daily life.
Faith must support service from works and works a lot more than being numerically should be excellent quality, are not so many commitments, the time spent in a thousand things and then not put an ounce of love in it. Just one thing, but done well, in a spirit of genuine love and devotion to the recipient that will receive it.
Mother Teresa wrote to her little sisters charity: "In our service do not count the results, but how much love you put in what you do" .
The service is more true of its results, most of the reward and achievement. True faith is not plant trees in the sea, even Jesus has ever done. Faith in the real miracle is to say, I want to be just a servant of those lives that are entrusted to me: my husband, my wife, my children, the elderly man who lost his health, and not even the pretense of its surplus recovery. Servant as my Lord, who came to serve, not to be served. I then big enough to plow fields, a grain of faith, hope and new eyes.
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S door Maria, servant of the Lord that you have given heart and soul to him, and have made entry into his house as a family helper in his work of salvation, the woman truly equal, that grace has brought within the Trinity, and made divine treasure trove of secrets , home of the Kingdom, have interpreted as a reduction in the service of freedom, but as belonging to the irreversible lineage of God, we ask that you admit that the permanent diaconate in the school of which we've been incomparable teacher. Unlike you, we struggle to put those employed by God, and it is hard to understand that only unconditional surrender its sovereignty can provide us the primordial alphabet for reading than any other human service. Foster care in the hands of the Lord seems to be a gamble. Submission to him, instead of placing it in a framework of bilateral alliance, we feel it as a variable of slavery. We're jealous, in short, of our autonomy. And the solemn affirmation that to serve God is to reign not persuade us that much.
S door Maria, servant of the Word, servant to the point that, in addition to listening to and watching you have received incarnate in Christ, help us put Jesus at the center of our lives. Does' suggestions that the experience secret. Give us a hand because we know to be faithful to the end. Grant us the bliss of those servants that he, back in the middle of the night, finds awake, and that, after having surrounded his clothes, he will sit at table and will to serve.
Don Tonino Bello
GOOD SUNDAY OF JOY!
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