Reflection from Friar Nicholas

THE HOLY GUARDIAN ANGELS Job 38:1,12-21,40:3-5; Ps 139:1-3,7-10,13-14; Mt 18:1-5,10 Angels Continually in God’s Presence We celebrate our guardian angels. This celebration complements our celebration of the Archangels: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Today, we celebrate all the angels in their role as our guardian angels. All the holy angels play this role at one time or the other. A guardian angel is an angel assigned to watch over a person or group of people. For example, Saint Michael the Archangel is the guardian angel of the people of God, Israel of old, and the Church as the new people of God. We recall that before the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima, the guardian angel of Portugal appeared to the three children to prepare them for the coming of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Especially, we celebrate our personal guardian angels. Each of us has an angel assigned to watch over us, guide us, and protect us every moment of our lives. Today’s celebration of our guardian angels reveal...

OUR LADY, QUEEN AND PATRONESS OF NIGERIA Isa 11:1-10; Ps 72:1-2,7-8,12-13,17; Eph 2:13-18, Mt 2:13-15,19-23 In His Day, Justice Shall Flourish The Church in Nigeria celebrates Our Lady, Queen and Patroness of Nigeria, to mark our purported Independence from the colonial masters. In celebrating this solemnity today, the Church understands that human beings can be genuinely free only when we overcome the forces of sin, darkness, and evil within and around us. The Church wants us to understand that only God can truly set us free from oppressive forces that are within and about us. God is not tardy in sending his word for our liberation. What delays our freedom is our poor reception of his word; we must do so wholeheartedly and with faith. Historically, we got our independence from colonial forces on 1st of October, 1960. But time has shown it was a change from foreign exploitative forces to local exploitative forces. We have come to understand that our real enemies are within us, th...

SAINT JEROME, PRIEST, DOCTOR Job 9:1-13,14-16; Ps 88:10-15; Lk 9:57-62 No Accommodation for the Son of Man The Word of God is with God from the beginning and is God. He bears and expresses the Father's will in all things and sustains all things by divine power. He remains in all that he made through their different natures, but distinct from all his creatures because of his infinite power and perfections. We always understand the material creation as expressions of the divine will and attributes proportionate to us, mortal men. Hence, the whole of creation is a divine school for our education in divine knowledge. The limited nature of the divine attributes in creatures continuously draws and guides our minds and hearts to the invisible, infinite divine qualities that are spiritually discerned. We can climb these visible staircases of creatures to invisible divine attributes by our spiritual nature. But the advent of sin incapacitated our nature in this most essential task; it...

SAINTS MICHAEL, GABRIEL AND RAPHAEL, ARCHANGELS Apoc 12:7-12; Ps 138:1-5; Jn 1:47-51 Descending and Ascending of Angels on the Son of Man We celebrate the archangels today. By this celebration, the Church brings us to consider, thank, and glorify God for the wonders of his love for us, poor sinners. The Scriptures make abundant references to the ministry of the angels in our salvation history. These make us aware of the existence of these spiritual creatures of God. He created them as spiritual or heavenly beings to praise and glorify his name and wonderful works of nature and grace. We have no clear idea of when they were created, but the Fathers of the Church hold that the reference to God’s creation of heaven in the beginning refers to the angelic beings. Saint Augustine considers the alternation of evening and day in the creation story as referring to the participation of angelic beings in the creation of the earth. Evening refers to initial confusion and gradual illumination...

MONDAY, TWENTY SIXTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Job 1:6-22; Ps 17:1-3,6-7; Lk 9:46-50 Anyone who welcomes Me welcomes the Father The book of Job gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of God's justice as it applies to our lives here on earth. Many Christians are ignorant of the fact that we have a formidable enemy who fights dirty; the devil is the enemy of our salvation. Since we are not to be afraid of the devil because of the precious blood of Jesus Christ that has ransomed us from the bondage of the devil, we must not be ignorant of his existence and continuous battle for the ruin of our souls. The devil's ultimate weapon against us is falsehood, or lies. Through delusions and manipulation of our senses and imagination, he attempts to lure us away from believing and living the word of God. When that fails because of our constant reading and meditations on the word of God, he goes after our attachments to created things. He uses our attachment to creatures to try to swa...

SUNDAY, TWENTY SIXTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Ezek 18:25-28; Ps 25:4-9; Phil 2:1-11; Mt 21:28-32 Doing the Will of the Father Our sins and sinful habits cause us to dwell in darkness. They make us remain ignorant of the will of God, our Father. To begin our journey toward the light, we must think deeply and understand what sin is. Sin is basically the abandonment of God’s holy will to do our own will. From the moment of the fall of Adam and Eve, the will of God that was clear to them became obscure, for they chose to do their own will at the instigation of the devil. Since the doing of our own will is always at the instigation of the devil, we not only sin against God by doing what we want instead of what God wants of us, but we become evil and share in the communion of evil doers. On this understanding, we see that God did not totally abandon us at the fall; he gave us his word about a future redemption of our race in the promise of the woman and her Offspring. That was a prophetic...