Reflection from Friar Nicholas

SAINT JOHN PAUL II, POPE Rom 6:12-18; Ps 124; Lk 12:39-48 The Coming of Christ in Grace Our Lord asked his disciples to pray for the grace to stand before the Son of Man when he appears in glory. But we know that standing before the Son of Man when he appears in glory will not be a problem for us if we are now standing before him in grace. What does it mean to stand before the Son of Man in grace? The standing here has the same meaning as the standing of the angels before the One of great age in the vision of the prophet Daniel. It is a spiritual standing that denotes eagerness to receive God’s revelation and to carry it out immediately. The angels are spiritual beings with no physical form to stand on. They are said to stand before God when they wait on him to receive the revelation of his will. The same applies to us when we wait on Jesus Christ to understand God’s will for us. Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the revelation of the Father comes from him to both angels an...

TUESDAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 5:12,15,17-21; Ps 40:7-10,17; Lk 12:35-38 Readiness for Grace from Jesus Christ Just as by our natural birth we all participate or inherit the original sin of Adam and Eve, and the proneness to sin, which is disobedience to God’s will, by our spiritual rebirth through the salvific work of Jesus Christ, we participate in the grace won by the perfect obedience of the Son of Man. As we have stated in our previous reflection, God’s abiding presence was connatural to his creatures before the fall of Adam and Eve. God’s grace was not lacking to them for their growth in knowledge and development of God’s likeness before they chose the way of death. Their choice to know death and walk the path of darkness, deprived them of the grace of God, as God forewarned them. They and their progenies enjoyed a minimal presence of grace. They eked out their livelihood through a cursed earth that yielded thorns and brambles in place of good fruits enhanc...

MON DAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 4:20-25; Lk 1:69-75; Lk 132:13-21 Desiring the Right Blessings Prayer is basically the desire for God. Although the desire manifests in different forms at various times and stages of our journey toward God. Because the original sin we inherited from Adam and the actual sins we committed against God gave us an orientation to creatures, in place of the original orientation of man to God, our spiritual journey entails the purification of our desire and refinement of our opinion about God. God attracts us by satisfying our bodily desires, but the indulgence of our sensible desires is only a sign of the deeper spiritual satisfaction He wants us to desire and enjoy. Thus, when our Lord wetted the appetite of the five thousand that he fed with five loaves and two fish, he presented his body and blood as the real food and drink they should longed for. Therefore, our spiritual journey and experience of prayer go through this purification, th...

SUNDAY, TWENTY NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Exod 17:8-13; Ps 121; 2 Tim 3:14-4:2; Lk 18:1-8 Grace of Self-Sacrifice to God The purpose of man’s life on earth is to be like God. We get this truth from the book of Genesis. To be like God requires that we gain knowledge of God one way or another. Since God is above our natural comprehension, he would have to reveal Himself to us to know him and model our lives on him. Secondly, being a supernatural knowledge and end, his presence and activity in us are required. For this reason, we stand in need of God at all times. In our reflection on the grace of God, we have come to know that God does not deny us his grace in any way but continuously offers us grace. Since the grace of God is his self-communication, God’s will or divine countenance is continuously turned to us for our salvation and redemption. The only hitch we experience from receiving his continuous and steadfast communication to us is our intermittent attention to God. Because...

FEAST OF SAINT LUKE, EVANGELIST   2 Tim 4:10-17; Ps 145:10-13,17-18; Lk 10:1-9 Remaining Consistent in Grace We have described God’s gift of graces as coming in a cycle of prevenient, actual, and thanksgiving graces. The grace of God does not come in cycles alone, but also in a consistent and frequent manner. Because the grace of God is His presence and holy will, given to us, it flows like a stream into us, to sustain our relationship and interaction with Him. Picturing the grace of God as a stream is consistent with Scripture. We see the consistency of God’s grace presented as a stream of water flowing from the divine fountain both in the Old and New Testaments. Our Lord himself used the image to refer to the Holy Spirit within the believers in the Gospel of John, chapter 8. We hardly experience this consistency of grace in our lives. Our inability to experience the consistency of grace is not from God, but from ourselves. The problem is our failure to consistently ful...

SAINT IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH, BISHOP, MARTYR   Rom 4:1-8; Ps 32:1-2,5,11; Lk 12:1-7 Avoiding the Yeast of Pharisees The root of hypocrisy is the desire to present to others qualities that are not genuinely ours. It is the desire to appear better than we really are to others. Hence, there is a saying that hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue. It arises from the desire of vice to dress itself in the borrowed garb of virtue. A hypocrite desires to deceive, which makes it evil and of the evil one. We are not truly converted when this yeast is present in us, for conversion is a sincere acknowledgement of our sinfulness before God and man. Hypocrisy is born from a desire to evade the grace of conversion, which we have called a prevenient grace. If we evade the prevenient grace, we equally evade the actual grace which follows it and occasions our encounter with Jesus Christ and declaration of faith in him. The implication of evading the prevenient and actual graces is our inabili...

THURSDAY, TWENTY EIGHTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 3:21-30; Ps 130:1-6; Lk 11:47-54 The Grace of Thanksgiving and Sacrifice After the actual grace which follows the prevenient grace, we reflect on the grace of thanksgiving or the sacrificial grace. The sacrificial grace completes the motion that started with God, for the accomplishment of every good work. As we stated earlier in the week, God is the cause of all good things; it means that nothing good begins without Him initiating it. Every good thing also ends in Him, and for his glory. His gift of prevenient grace progresses to actual grace and culminates in the sacrificial grace of thanksgiving. The grace of thanksgiving helps us to offer a proper thanksgiving to God, through Jesus Christ, for using or enabling us to accomplish a good work through our Lord Jesus Christ. Thanksgiving is a symbol of the gift of ourselves to God, corresponding to God’s self-communication to us in His Son, Jesus Christ. Our thanksgiving or self-sac...

SAINT TERESA OF AVILA, VIRGIN, DOCTOR Rom 2:1-11; Ps 62:2-3,6-7,9; Lk 11:42-46 The Insufficiency of Prevenient Grace What comparison can we make of prevenient grace and actual grace? We must proceed from the fact that God made us for himself, and He alone can bring us to participate in divine life; that is, to be like him. We are not passive in God’s transformative work of making us like God; we are active participants through our spiritual faculties. Therefore, prevenient grace is necessary to bring us to an awareness of God’s will, as beneficial for us. It fosters a willingness to do God’s will in us. It is not sufficient to make us realise or accomplish the divine will. Actual grace enables us to cooperate with God in accomplishing His divine will. It is one thing for a child to want to take a bath, and entirely a different thing for it to wash itself clean. Its willingness is needed for it to cooperate with the mother or father, who intends to wash the baby. If we are open, t...

TUESDAY, TWENTY EIGHTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 1:16-25; Ps 19:2-5; Lk 11:37-41 Our Evasion of Grace The divine purpose for creating us demands that he make his grace abundant for us, that we may attain the end for which He made us. God never failed in this duty of provision of abundant grace for man to know, love, and serve God. Our nature and the intention of God to make us like himself demand that we pay attention to the abundant grace of God and make a personal choice to attend to God, know him, and serve him. Consider the abundance of prevenient grace contained in the instruction: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat it you shall die.” Lack of attention to the word of God prevented them from eating of the many good trees in the garden, thereby hindering their advancement in the knowledge of God and His will. The word of God provides many latitudes or degrees of freed...

MONDAY, TWENTY EIGHTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Rom 1:1-7; Ps 98:1-4; Lk 11:29-32 The Sign of the Son of Man God understands us completely as the work of His hand. He knows that attention is a big problem for us, especially in our fallen state. So, He put structures within us and outside that would signal to us the coming of disaster due to our choices, actions, and inactions. These signs call our attention to a forthcoming destruction that lies in our chosen course of action or inaction. God is infinitely just and merciful; he would not put options before us without letting us know the possible outcome of each choice we make. These revelations and signs are part of the prevenient grace, or the grace that comes before the actual grace. Even before the first fall of Adam and Eve, God gave them His word and the outcome that would follow their rejection of the Word of Life. He informed them they would know death the day they tasted the fruit that was forbidden to them. Vigilance is requ...

SUNDAY, TWENTY EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 2 Kings 5:14-17; Ps 98:1-4; 2 Tim 2:8-13; Lk 17:11-19 Abiding in Good Works The Church prays in the opening prayer for God to anticipate us with His grace, and for the same grace to follow us thereafter. The ordinary course of things or divine action with us is that God anticipates us with his grace, for nothing moves without God moving it. Since God moves us in all things, he sends his grace to anticipate us. To respond to the anticipatory grace requires that we be in the state of grace and have a life that is commensurable or connatural with God. The Holy Spirit remains with us for this purpose: that we may develop a divine sensibility, enabling us to respond to God’s inspiration supernaturally and easily. The commensurability or spiritual sensibility is what our new spirit stands for, and defines when we develop it. Just as a natural baby grows and develops with constant nourishment and exercise of its faculties, our spirit grows a...

SATURDAY, TWENTY SEEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME   Joel 4:12-21; Ps 97:1-2,5-6,11-12; Lk 11:27-28 The Blessing of the Word of God The day of the Lord is about the revelation of God and his holy will to the people and their situation. It is about God sending his word to us in a new and pronounced way to address our situation in time. The coming of the word God is a blessing to the faithful and a punishment to the evildoers. The punishment stems from the destruction of unjust and evil structures within society and the world. The destruction affects sinners in a painful way because they thrived on the illicit structures and pleasures. Hence, the demons inhabiting the sinful structures rule over them and use them as agents to perpetrate injustice and harm on good people. The day of the Lord is therefore a day of judgment for all peoples. Joel prophesied a worldwide judgment to take place in the Valley of Decision. “Let the nations rouse themselves, let them march to the Valle...

FRIDAY, TWENTY SEEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME   Joel 1:13-15,2:1-5; Ps 9:2-3,6,16,8-9; Lk 11:15-26 The Day of the Lord The character of the day of the Lord is variously presented in the scriptures. It is sometimes portrayed as a day of darkness and evil, a day of suffering, pain, and agony. At the same time, the scriptures have an alternative painting of a glorious day of the Lord. The various pictures fit into God's salvific plan for His people. In all that Yahweh does, he intends the salvation of the peoples. The day of the Lord is in any case, the day he decides to act in a decisive way for the salvation of the people. The divine action is always for the good of those who believe in him. Whether the day is that of physical calamities, pains, and sufferings, or that of goodness and physical blessings of a sort or another, the faithful offer praises to God for everything, for they see the hand of God in every event of life. But the unbelievers are wont to curse and reje...

THURSDAY, TWENTY SEEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME   Mal 3:13-20; Ps 1:1-4,6; Lk 11:5-13 Exploring the Father’s Disposition We are bred and nurtured in human families. So, we draw our knowledge and idea of a father from our imperfect human fathers. The effects of sins, both original and actual, enter our lives and influence the roles we play within the family and our relationships with one another. It is unfortunate that we look to God as our Father with the sin-affected images of our fathers on earth. The wrong image or model of a father we have influences our reception of God’s communication of Himself as Father. Another factor contributing to our ignorance of God as Father is our physical perception of reality, compared to God’s encompassing knowledge of all things. God is love and expresses his love for us in every dealing with us. His infinite knowledge informs his loving relationship and dealings with us. Because we are deficient on these two counts: a poor image of a...