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THE CHRISTIAN PRAYER

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THURSDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME Sirach 48:1-15; Ps 97:1-7; Mt 6:7-15 What Christian Prayer is About Prayer is the core of our life as Christians. To understand the essence of prayer and pray well is to live the Christian life well and be pleasing to God. Not to pray well is to miss out on the essentials of Christian life and our communion with God. We have understood the Christian life as a spiritual communion with God. Since God is the Supreme Spirit, our communion with Him is more interior and spiritual. Therefore, the prerequisite condition for a good prayer life is living a recollected or interior life. Because God is the foundation of our existence, we enter the path of prayer by conversing with our inner selves. Through self-awareness, we progress to the awareness of the Supreme Consciousness we call God, who reveals Himself to us in all things, but within us as our origin. On this basis, we present prayer as a rooting exercise; it is an exercise to renew our spi...
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RELATING TO GOD IN SECRET

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WEDNESDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME 2 Kings 2:1,6-14; Ps 31:20,21,24; Mt 6:1-6,16-18 Interior and Spiritual Communication Our sharing one life with God is an interior and a family thing, and not public. Family life and interactions are only known to the members of the family. The love each member has for the others is evident within the house or home, but it also motivates each member of the family in their external engagements. Once in a while, we witness an abnormality in family life, a member of a family hates another member, spouse, son or daughter, sibling, and makes a public show of loving them. Such hypocrisy is evil. Saint John informs us in his first letter, 1 Jn 3:15, that one who hates his brother or sister is a murderer. One who hates his brother or sister, or spouse, mother, or father, is indeed a murderer; such a one is not begotten of God and does not know God at all. Our Lord confirms this in Mt 5:23, where he directed us not to make an offering to God bea...
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RECEIVING THE WORD OF GOD AS SONS

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TUESDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME 1 Kings 21:17-29; Ps 51:3-6,11,16; Mt 5:43-48 Sons of the Heavenly Father The Christian vocation is to share the life of God forever. For us to share the life of God, we must be born of God. The Father sends the Holy Spirit into our souls for this purpose, that we may be born of God. The spiritual birth occurs at the moment of our baptism into the death of Jesus Christ and resurrection with Him to a new and spiritual life. The word of God is the seed of our spiritual life, as stated by Peter in his first letter 1:23, and also the means of its sustenance. It is necessary that we eat of the word in its uncontaminated form. If we contaminate the word of God in any way, then we will not have one life with the Triune God. The adulterated word of God is poison to our spiritual system and can cause serious damage to our nascent spiritual life. The contamination of the word can come from ourselves or from those we are listening to in an uncritica...
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Earthly and Heavenly Values

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MONDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME 1 Kings 21:1-16; Ps 5:2-3,5-7; Mt 5:38-42 The Christian Value System Just as the Christian virtues have a different origin or principle from the natural virtues, the Christian system of values differs from the natural or the world’s value system. A natural person instinctively and naturally seeks to preserve his life and whatever makes it flourish. On the other hand, our vocation to follow Jesus Christ to death and the spiritual life that the Holy Spirit gives us at the moment of our profession of faith in Christ gives us a different orientation in life. As we mentioned in yesterday’s reflection, the new life we have received from Jesus Christ is oriented towards death to self and being present to God to fulfil His holy will. This is why the life of a Christian can never be comprehended by a worldly-minded person. What a man of the world wants is opposed to what a Christian wants. As Christians, we live no longer to satisfy our desires, bu...
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RECEIVING AND GIVING WITHOUT CHARGE

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SUNDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME Exod 19:2-6; Ps 100:2-3,5; Rom 5:6-11; Mt 9:36-10:8 The Kingdom of Priests The difficulty of our Christian life does not consist so much in what we are to do, but in what we are not to do. Another way of putting this is that we are saved by grace and not by our own deeds. We have been nurtured in a world corrupted by sin and evil, where the self is exalted above God. Our conversion to the Lord involves unlearning the ways of the world and replacing them with the way of grace. The process is not easy, and was never meant to be easy, because it involves dying to self and living unto God. Christian virtues, as we reflected on last week, have a different principle from the natural virtues of this world. In the world, the strong man is praised and exalted because he can elevate himself while putting others down; he wields influence to win the admiration and adulation of others. But such is not the spiritual way of the Christian. We are rather c...
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IMMACULATE HEART OF LOVE

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IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY   1 Kings 19:19-21; Ps 16:1-2,5,7-10; Lk 2:41-51 A Fitting Dwelling for the Holy Spirit It is the custom of the Church to celebrate the Immaculate Heart of Mary immediately after the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. The Church celebrates it as a memorial. The custom follows our understanding of the deep connection between the two hearts of love: our Saviour Jesus Christ and His beloved mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. No other human heart shares and participates in the mystery of love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ more than the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her loving links to the Sacred Heart are on different levels. She loves him as her dear and only son, to whom she dedicated her whole life and efforts; She loves him as the Eternal Word of God made flesh for our salvation; She loves him with the love of the disciple for her master, for she is the first disciple of the Lord; She loves him as her God, for ...
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GOD IS LOVE

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SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST SACRED HEART OF JESUS   Deut 7:6-11; Ps 103:1-4,6-8,10; 1 Jn 4:7-16; Mt 11:25-30 Great Things hidden from the Wise We celebrate the solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. The Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ is a mystery, as coming from the mystery of the Son of Man. The human heart of Jesus Christ is a symbol and reality of the love of the Son of Man for his brothers and sisters. It is a human representation of the heart or love of the Son of God for us, his own people and creatures. As he revealed in Heb 2:14, that he took on our nature, that he may share everything in common with us. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity, so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death.” The Father brought us into existence to be the inheritance and the companions of His Beloved Son. The love of the Son for his own could not let him be, but made him take on our nature and appear among ...
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