Daily Scripture

Scripture:

Genesis 8:6-13, 20-22
Mark 8:22-26

Reflection:

Jesus, whenever I read of your curing of the blind man I am reminded of a visit to the Shrine of Our Lady in Lourdes, France.   It was at the grotto that Mary appeared to St. Bernadette.  I joined the many pilgrims were present there. Everyone there was praying either for themselves or for others who were ill.   There was a prayerful atmosphere which was very tangible. 

I went to the baths, was totally submerged in the pool of water and prayed for by a priest and layman. I don’t think I have ever heard such fervent prayers, begging for healing.  A young crippled boy was brought in by two men.  As the little fellow was placed in the pool of water he let out a little scream of surprise…the water was not that warm!  Watching and listening to the priest and layman again, you knew that this little guy was their sole attention, begging for a miracle. 

I wandered around the grounds afterwards.  Approaching the old church I saw a piece of statuary, depicting a woman sitting on a stretcher placed on the ground while two men stood at either end.  They were stretcher bearers.  I looked at the woman and noticed that around her head, covering her eyes was a piece of cloth.  I didn’t quite understand what that meant.  Then I looked down and saw an inscription on the side of the stretcher.  "I came here seeking sight for my eyes, and left with sight for my soul."  I have never forgotten that line.  It has given me a broader picture of what prayer is all about. 

Never would I tell anyone not to pray for a healing, for a miracle. The people in the gospel narrative for today brought the blind man to You.  He wanted to see, and You healed his blindness. . 

What comes to mind is that all of us are asked to be open to the answer You give to us.  Any loved one or friend is often challenged by a request that starts, "I want…."   That’s honest.  But not the total picture.  Isn’t the need I have the most important part of any request.  And that need that I see might also have to be filtered through "…but I leave it in Your hands as to what I really need."  Jesus, You said in Your own words, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, but not my will but Yours be done."   I wish that I could say that this was easy for You.  It wasn’t.  But neither were You alone.  The Father was with You.  

Can I/you who are reading this put into the Father’s hand my/our need when we pray…"Our Father, who art in heaven…Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…"

Fr. Peter Berendt, C.P. is on the staff of Holy Name Passionist Retreat Center, Houston, Texas.

Scripture:

Genesis 3:9-24
Mark 8:1-10

Reflection:

Talk about a packed feast!  Today we celebrate the hearts and flowers feast of Valentines Day across America and, at the same time, in our liturgical life, we celebrate the feast day of two brothers, saints Cyril and Methodius.  Cyril was a monk (but not for very long in actuality) and Methodius was a bishop (with a very stormy tenure to say the least!)  And in addition to these already colorful themes of the day, we have very dramatic readings from the book of Genesis and the Gospel of Mark which give us amazing images of God who is both a generous giver of good things as well as the sole arbiter of what is good and evil.  Let’s look at some of the images for this special day, February 14^th, 2009.

Of course, Valentines Day is meant to be a time of sharing notes of love and friendship with special people in our lives.  As commercialized as this day may be, it is still a great day that gives us all a chance to say "I love you" to a few or even many people who come into our lives.  But where can you find a Valentine greeting any better than the message found in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus, "heart moved with pity", sees the needs of his hungry people and miraculously provides an abundance of food for them, and all from only a few fish and seven loaves of bread?  Now there is a Valentine that says "I love you" and in which we can really place our trust!

For me, personally, however, it is the Genesis account of the "great fall" of our "first parents", Adam and Eve, which really captures my attention this Valentines Day.  Through his creation and the offering of a blissful life in the Garden, God shows how great his love and hopes are for us, his beloved children.  Yet, we sin even against a God who is so generous and gracious; we eat the forbidden fruit; we suddenly become aware of our nakedness with uncharacteristic self-consciousness; and we know for the first time what it means to be embarrassed, ashamed, and sorrowful.  Milton captured this moment so dramatically with his great masterpiece, Paradise Lost.  How terribly true: by turning away from God in our pride and sin we have lost Paradise and the joy of the Garden.  We will never be the same again and the snake will forever crawl on his belly!

Of course, we are wiser now!  We discover that we cannot give up on ourselves because God has chosen not to give up on us.  A Savior is promised, a Messiah is awaited.  And just maybe, if we really try to do it right this time, we will rediscover the promise of the Garden and find passage beyond the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword.

 

Fr. Pat Brennan, CP is the director of Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center in Sierra Madre, California.

Scripture:

Genesis 6:5-8, 7:1-5, 10
Mark 8:14-21

Reflection:

Jesus was a person of tremendous contemplative intuition.  I would guess, that as he was growing up, he was often the observer, silently watching people and their interactions; the eruptions of their feeling and emotions; how they acted in response to different stimuli that touched them.  His contemplative intuition began to reveal the inner hearts of those he was observing.

The very fact we grow older and have many experiences in life, helps us develop an ability to see underneath a lot of commotion.  Children who are experiencing many things for the first time in their young lives, have no idea that the adults watching them can often see right through them.  As an adult we may be chuckling and saying to ourselves, "Been there.  Done that."

Teenagers may be a little more difficult to read.  They often feel that they are surrounded by a secret shield that makes the adult world stand in shock and a state of dumbfoundedness.  Parents, because of their emotional involvement with their own teenagers, can lose some of this adult perception and begin to pull out their hair in frustration.  It may take a little more intuitive ability, but teenagers are not that hard to read with regards to their basic patterns of growth.  Each new generation seems to need to reinvent the wheel.

A certain contemplative ability comes with age and experience.  However, there are much more profound levels of life harvesting intuitions that must be developed with prayer and reflection and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  We need to dwell with suffering; get inside and abide in the human heart; feel the pain and loneliness of others; meditate on the passion and death of Jesus; learn more about other cultures and how people feel and live their lives there.  We try not to let life just pass us by as a blur.  We try to intuit the heart of what is happening.

Our readings today reveal this contemplative ability in God.  In the Genesis passage, God not only sees how great was the external wickedness of man but he also saw "how no desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil, he regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was grieved."  But God, able to read hearts, knew the goodness of heart of Noah and his family.

The disciples, in the boat, were all befuddled when Jesus began speaking about the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.  They concluded that Jesus spoke these words because they forget to bring enough bread for the crossing.  As he did so often, Jesus must have shook his head in amazement at their lack of understanding.  But reading their hearts and seeing their inner darkness and confusion, he responded, "….. Are you hearts so hardened?"  Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?

The eyes we use to see and the ears we use to hear must lead us beyond the mere externals and help us to read the inner dimensions of what we are experiencing.  We are all called to this kind of contemplation.  True, some seem to be highly gifted in this area and we love to read their reflections on life.  But don’t underestimate your calling to do the same.

 

Fr. Blaise Czaja, C.P. gives parish missions and retreats.  He is a member of the Passionist Community in Detroit, Michigan. 

Scripture:

Genesis 3:1-8
Mark 7:31-37

Reflection:

 Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote: "What is essential is invisible to the eye."

Today’s readings are deeply immersed in the human senses, especially those of sight and hearing.  What gifts all of our senses are!  When all of our senses are working well, we are able to "make sense" of our world (at least the small world of our immediate family, community and friends). The deception of Adam and Eve by the serpent was a case of trying to go beyond their human senses, to a place reserved only for God.  After they ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we read, "then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked."  In going beyond the only limit God had imposed on them, they knew shame, and even worse, fear of God’s presence.

In the Gospel, Jesus heals a deaf man who had a speech impediment.  Jesus orders the stopped-up ears: "BE OPENED!", and immediately the man could hear and speak plainly. 

Perhaps our readings are asking you and me a couple of simple questions today: "What in me (in us, as church, society) is stopped-up, or deaf?  Are we deaf (even partially so) to the sufferings/needs of others?  How can we (I) help others to open up more fully to God’s healing love in and around them?

"What is essential is invisible to the eye."  Indeed.  Only by taking on Jesus’ heart as our very own, will we be able to see, hear and then do God’s loving will fully.

 

Fr. Bob Bovenzi, C.P. is stationed in Chicago, Illinois.

Scripture:

Genesis 2:18-25
Mark 7:24-30

Reflection:

Today is the 200th anniversary of the births of two men who significantly changed the course of history: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.  Interestingly enough today’s first reading from Genesis relates a section of one of that book’s accounts of creation.  The conjunction of these events prompts a reflection on humanness-what it means to be human. 

Human, humus, and humility-they all derive from the same root meaning "of the soil" or "of lowly origin". In the first reading we have the image of God taking earth (humus) and fashioning all manner of creatures.  But the only worthy mate for the human was the one of common origin. 

Inspired by Darwin, scientists have begun to explain the "how" of our beginnings as humans.  While we may think of humus (the common soil beneath our feet) as being of lowly origin, in fact its richness demands that (as astrophysicist Carl Sagan would put it) it is made of "star stuff".  The complex organic compounds that make up earth in fact come from elements that result from exploding stars.  So this stuff that makes up dirt is here only because distant stars have met their demise.  The stuff that makes us up, carbon and other elements came from cosmic events.  Our bodies have literally been billions of years in the making.  Human beings are creation conscious of creation.  God has created us in a most wondrous way. 

Humanity has not consistently recognized the inherent dignity of us all.  Some factions constantly plot to suppress other groups.   Is this competition for survival run amuck?  Is this the "original sin"?  God became incarnate to bring the Good News that we are to love one another.  Still, the United States Constitution actually counted slaves as less than a full persons.  Abraham Lincoln came along at a point in time when we needed to be reminded that all races deserved equal treatment.  His insights help us recognize that the very nature of human beings means that all share a common dignity.  His efforts led eventually to the Constitution’s encoding the recognition of the dignity of all people.   

Humility is truth. Our physical origins consist of the common stuff of the earth, and that stuff itself has cosmic origins.  Possessing the virtue of humility means accepting our strong points and our weaknesses as well. We neither falsely put ourselves down nor falsely exalt ourselves as someone we are not.  The Gospel reading is a story of Jesus driving out a demon.  Not all our "demons" are outside us.  For example, the twelve-step programs tell us we cannot "cure" or drive out many addictions.  We live a virtuous life by learning to live with them.  Being naked with no shame can mean facing fault or addiction and knowing we are dealing with it.  We can modify our behavior but the addiction is still there.  That requires a lot of humility. 

So today’s readings remind us that God has created us in a most wondrous way, and bestowed upon us a fantastic dignity.  Let us walk humbly with God.

 

Brother John Monzyk, C.P. is a physicist and a member of the Passionist community in Louisville, Kentucky.

Scripture:

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17
Mark 7:14-23

Reflection:

With every new RCIA class, someone always asks the question:  "What was so bad about Adam and Eve eating an apple that would cause God to punish them so severely?"  A variation on that question is: Are Catholics who disobeyed the Church many years ago by eating a hotdog on Friday really burning in hell?  The corollary is this: Who can love a God (Church) who is so unjust as to level the same eternal condemnation against cruel, evil people and on hotdog eaters?

The answer is, of course, that there nothing inherently wrong in eating apples or hotdogs; and God is not petty and unjust.

God gave Adam and Eve breathtaking freedom in the Garden of Eden.  But this was not unlimited freedom, another word for anarchy.  With their freedom came limits.  God asked our first parents – and us – to obey him and respect those limits.  When we disobey, we suffer the consequences; we punish ourselves.

True freedom is found only in God; outside of God, there is no freedom.  To use our freedom outside of God is fall into the slavery of sin.

Simple example: In the United States, I am free to go anywhere I choose.  But when driving on the highway system, I am not free to disregard traffic laws simply because I don’t feel like stopping or slowing down.

Viktor E. Frankl said it well: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Neither apple nor hotdog defile us.  All foods are clean.  Rather, it is in our response to Christ that we grow and find true freedom.

 

Deacon Manuel Valencia is on the staff at Mater Dolorasa Passionist Retreat Center, Sierra Madre, California.

Scripture:

Job 7:1-4, 6-7
1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23
Mark 1:29-39

Reflection:

During this jubilee year of Paul the apostle today’s second reading gives us great insight into his person. The Gospel was precious to Paul. He was not ashamed of this good news. He knew personally the power and wisdom of its message. Like Jeremiah of old, the Gospel becomes a fire in Paul’s bones and he is compelled to proclaim it. I remember studying the Scriptures in Israel, Greece and Egypt as a part of my Masters degree at our theologate, the Catholic Theological Union. While visiting Egypt, the Egyptian children used to run up to us shouting, "backsheesh!" This is an Arabic word for begging that literally means, "share the wealth." Pope Paul VI in the Magna Charta of evangelization Evangelii Nuntiadi wrote, "The Gospel is not something we impose on people. People have a right to hear good news." The late Holy Father saw the Gospel as an eternal treasure that people have a right to. Paul, also, was desperate about making the Gospel known because all deserve its riches.

Paul so wanted people to know the riches of the Gospel that he became "all things to all people." Some would consider this people pleasing or being codependent. Paul was simply behaving how ever he could to work with people beginning at their level of understanding and approach to worship so that they could "be saved." As a missionary I meet liberals, conservatives, traditionalists, charismatics, Marianists and every other brand of Catholics that exists. My role is not to change them into what I am, but to find common ground with them. Then the door opens to inspire them to be the best they can be. Often this requires that I swallow my spiritual pride and lay aside the "flavor" of Catholicism that I adhere to. Missionaries are invited to accept and identify with people as they are for the sake of the Gospel. This is a great challenge, but has borne fruit.

Mark’s Gospel tells us that Peter’s mother-in-law went from fever to fervor because of the touch of Jesus. She went from being passive to a passionate servant. Because of Jesus’ touch we too have a new energy, a new fire, and we are compelled to share the treasure that is Jesus. If we listen closely, we will hear the world crying out, "backsheesh!, backsheesh!" Paul gives us a wonderful example of how to share the Gospel effectively and fervently.

 

Fr. Cedric Pisegna, C.P. is a missionary preacher, author of 12 books and creator of the TV program Live with Passion! airing in many cities. You can learn more about his ministry at: http://www.frcedric.org/

Scripture:

Hebrews 13:1-8
Mark 6:14-29

Reflection:

I was driving in the neighborhood recently and a large sign on the front lawn of a church caught my attention. It was a very uncomplicated, one-word sign: WELCOME. I know people who say they go to a particular church because the pastor is an outstanding preacher or because the church community is very welcoming. Even if there is a church closer, they will drive further to be with a community where they feel welcomed.

The author of Hebrews tells us, "Do not neglect hospitality…" The biblical demand for hospitality is clear in both Old and New Testaments. In the Scriptures God has welcomed us, who are aliens and strangers, into the "household of faith." Now we are required to offer hospitality to others. Hospitality makes room for the stranger, especially those in most acute need. This is more than social entertaining and is not based on self-interest and does not expect anything in return.

The characters in our gospel story today are positively removed from a spirit of hospitality. Rather, they are frozen in their own self-interest. Herodias harbored a grudge against John the Baptist. Herod didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of his guests so he reluctantly decreed the beheading of John the Baptist to save face.

Hospitality is not about me. When my ego gets involved, I am definitely missing the primary reason for hospitality. John Ruskin, a poet of the 19th century, writes, "When a man is all wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package." That certainly describes Herod and Herodias.

If you want to extend compassionate hospitality, consider talking with a person who is often ignored by others, comfort the grieving, share your faith with someone searching for meaning, speak an encouraging word to the weak, visit the sick, host neighbors in your home for the sole purpose of getting to know them, respond to those in a crisis, provide food for the homeless or support a food pantry, offer a kind word to the beggar at the street corner, visit a widow in your neighborhood on a regular basis, reach out to those who are experiencing domestic violence/abuse in their homes, have lunch with your obnoxious or agnostic co-worker, invite someone to Sunday Mass with you.  

As Jesus welcomes us as strangers, may we have the grace to welcome the stranger into our life and community.

Today is the feast of the Martyrs of Japan. Paul Miki, age 35, along with 25 other Japanese Catholics, was crucified on February 5, 1597. All were canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1862. Let us remember their heroism and, through the intercession of these martyrs, pray for the Catholic Church in Japan.

 

Fr. Don Webber, C.P., is Provincial Superior of Holy Cross Province and resides in Chicago.