Reflection from Friar Nicholas

SATURDAY, THIRD WEEK OF LENT    Hos 5:15-6:6; Ps 51:3-4,18-21; Lk 18:9-14 Our Spiritual Vocation to God Man is a mystery in relation to God. As we have often stated, this mystery originates from the divine will to make man in the divine image and likeness. Hence, each of us is lost in the mystery of self-discovery or self-knowledge. The mystery bears many facets: biological, psychological, and spiritual. We encounter its most complicated aspect in our attempts to understand our moral selves. The complications arise from the confluence of psychological and spiritual streams within our individual awareness, which is often outside our personal control. This feeling of inadequacy in our innermost self to handle our moral weakness and bankruptcy is the original call or vocation to religion. It is the consequence of the disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and our own personal disobedience to the word of God forbidding us from eating the fruit of the tree of knowle...

FRIDAY, THIRD WEEK OF LENT    Hos 14:2-10; Ps 81:6,8-11,14,17; Mk 12:28-34 The Communion of Love Because most of us were conceived and born in sin, raised up among sinful people, the awareness of God is not part of our constitutive and foundational awareness. We must strive to incorporate and grow in our awareness of God daily. After the fall of Adam and Eve from the state of pristine grace in which God created them, by which they abandoned the presence and the grace of direct awareness of God, God called Abraham with the intention of growing a people that would inherit what Adam and Eve abandoned by their own choice. The project of raising a people who would truly belong to God, not just by name, but in spirit and in truth, requires the free choice to believe and stay with God through the thick and thin of our sinful human conditions. The task before such people is to receive the word of God with faith and use it to build their worldview, within which they receive and i...

THURSDAY, THIRD WEEK OF LENT    Jer 7:23-28; Ps 95:1-2,6-9; Lk 11:14-23 Scattering by lack of Attention To believe in God is to desire to know Him and His divine will for us. Our profession of faith in God and in Jesus Christ does not align with our lack of attention to the Word of God. We cannot claim to profess faith in God and at the same time show no interest in knowing God’s will for us. By our rational nature, which God endowed us with at creation, we understand that we are structured to listen attentively to creation and to God. This is because everything around us and within us is well-structured and ordered for various purposes. So, to live in such a well-structured universe, man needs to pay close attention to creatures all around him to understand and follow the wisdom of the Creator. This is even more important in view of our role as stewards in the universe of creation, as God assigned us. Understood thus, we see that attentiveness ought to be our natur...

WEDNESDAY, THIRD WEEK OF LENT    Deutero 4:1,5-9; Ps 147:12-13,15-16,19-20; Mt 5:17-19 Attaining the Spirit of the Law As Saint Paul attested in his letter to the Romans, the Law is good as coming from the God who is infinitely good. He therefore wondered why the good Law produces evil results in us. The problem is an overemphasis on the written code without an equal or corresponding emphasis on God, who makes Himself present to His people through the means of the Law. The Law is a codification of the restrictions that prevent anyone from falling out of communion with God and His people. The focus should not be on the codes of the Law, but on God, who is the cause of the covenantal communion with the people of Israel. Our personal experiences validate this assertion or understanding. It is usually the case that our beginnings in spirituality are marked by a strong desire not to offend God by breaking any of the commandments. This initial focus on keeping the command...

TUESDAY, THIRD WEEK OF LENT    Dan 3:25,34-43; Ps 25:4-6,7-9; Mt 18:21-35 Moving from Ritual to Practice Because God is a Spirit, the Supreme Spirit, whom we cannot easily see or perceive to be with and within us, the tendency remains for us to formalize or ritualize our dealings with Him. However, the fact is not that we do not interact with God or relate to Him on a daily basis, but that we fail to recognize that God is within every aspect of our experience and never absent from all we perceive with our senses. Because we have not developed the needed personal communion with God through His word, we consider God very distant from us and only reachable through religious rituals and formalities. The ignorance of God’s closeness to us and his dwelling within us causes us to falter and commit sin very often. The entire Lenten observance of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving is geared toward developing our personal relationship with God. Fasting from all that distracts us...

MONDAY, THIRD WEEK OF LENT    2 Kings 5:1-15; Ps 42:2-3,43:3-4; Lk 4:24-30 The Prophetic Presence of the Word The story of Naaman the Aramean commander reveals something to us, which our Lord used to taunt the audience in his hometown of Nazareth during his ministry there. It reveals the fact that God is interested in everyone, irrespective of the tribe, race, people, or nation; He created everything and everyone. So, he is interested in their well-being and ultimate salvation. We ought to use this revelation to correct our misconception that God's salvation is only suited for particular people and not for others. The leprosy of Naaman, the Aramaean army commander, made him open to receive the word of God proclaimed by an Israeli slave girl in his house. The passage from 2 Kings reveals that the Lord granted victory to the Aramaeans through Naaman. Thus, God made it that they carried the little girl as a slave who would open the eyes of Naaman to the presence of God in I...