Reflection from Friar Nicholas

MONDAY, TWELVETH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME 2 Kings 17:5-8,13-15; Ps 60:3-5,12-13; Mt 7:1-5 Our Judgement of Others We continue on the Sermon on the Mount of our Lord Jesus, which we have considered the foundation of Christian spirituality. A foundation that is evidently more solid and deeper than that of the Old Testament and any other spirituality or religion. The foundation of Christian spirituality is laid deep within each person's interior. Such depth within each of us can only be accessed by the Son of Man through the Holy Spirit, for it is located in the centre of the individual person as the place of God within each of us. Thus, the spirituality arising from the Sermon on the Mount is unique to a Christian and cannot be imitated by any other religion or founded on any other name. Jesus Christ has the authority to lay this foundation as the Son of Man and the Son of God. As he affirmed himself in Jn 8:34-35, that the Son has freedom and authority in the House which no sla...

SUNDAY, TWELVETH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME Jer 20:10-13; Ps 69:8-10,14,17,33-35; Rom 5:12-15; Mt 10:26-33 Our Declaration for Jesus Christ Our quest for God, for the kingdom of God where righteousness will be at home, is an uphill task for the obvious reasons. First is the weakness of our wills, which have been weakened by the original and actual sins. Second is the fact of our habituation to physical or sensible things; believing and sticking with unseen realities becomes very hard and difficult. Third is the gravitational pull of the throng of those who follow the way of the world, pursuing and sacrificing themselves for the riches and wealth of this temporal world or kingdom. Fourth is the presence and activities of principalities and powers, thrones and dominions of demonic spirits who rule over these throngs of people desiring temporal goods and wealth. Fifth is the difficulty of discerning the true spiritual path amidst so much confusion and confused preachers of the Gospel. ...

SATURDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME 2 Chron 24:17-25; Ps 89:4-5,29-34; Mt 6:24-34 The Assurance of Tomorrow A fundamental reason the Lord calls us to interior prayer is because of the constitution of the physical world or reality. Living through the senses instils inside us worry and anxiety because of the constant change with which physical things are characterised. The constant changes we witness in the external world are supposed to invite us to interior life, where we encounter the true and unchanging reality. The account of the creation of the world, which is the beginning of the Holy Scripture, tells us that the sources of what we see is the unchanging word of God. So, we are to seek clarity about them, not in their ever-changing form of existence, but in the word of God, which is their principle. Subsequently, living and interacting with a changing world daily leaves us drawn out at the end of the day. To remain genuine to ourselves and focused on the goal and purpo...

FRIDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDERINARY TIME 2 Kings 11:1-4,9-18,20; Ps 132:11-14,17-18; Mt 6:19-23 The Treasure found Within God is the end of man in the sense that we are made to live in the communion of the Trinity of Persons in God. The communion is possible because of the will of the Triune God to make us in his image and likeness. We are able to live in communion with God, sharing the life of God, because we share in the image of God. The communion in faith will bring us to be like God. The difficulty we face on our journey through life is to achieve likeness with God through maintaining a spiritual communion. It is the project of God that needs our cooperation to achieve. We begin with the image of God, for that does not require our cooperation, but is given to us as a gift by God. This is not the case with likeness to God; each of us must personally cooperate with the Triune God to become God-like. The project would be impossible without our conscious interaction with God, wh...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

SAINT BARNABAS, APOSTLE  Acts 11:21-26,13:1-3; Ps 98:1-6; Mt 5:20-26 Acquisition of Heavenly Virtues The essence of the Sermon on the Mount is to lay a solid foundation for Christian spirituality. Because it ought to be a spirituality based on the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, as the Saviour of humankind, the Mosaic Law does not satisfy the requirements. So, obedience to the Law and the Prophets is not sufficient, though it is necessary. Salvation flows from the redemptive work of the Son of Man and not from individual works of each of us. There must be an essential connection, on the three levels of body, soul, spirit, of each person to Christ, for the salvation or grace to flow in full capacity. On this basis, we have understood and explained the necessity of receiving a new birth different from our natural birth by human parents. The old Law makes reference to Moses and his deliverance of the people of Israel from physical and psychological bondage in Egypt. The Gospel of grac...

WEDNESDAY, TENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME  1 Kings 18:20-39; Ps 16:1-2,4-5,8,11; Mt 5:17-19 The Demand of God’s Justice We often miss the point of the need to habituate our minds to the word of God. We fail to understand that ignorance of the word of God and his loving presence will not spare us from the manipulations of demons and evil people. That is, if our lamps are not lit and placed on the lampstand or on a tub, forces of darkness will invade our space and force their way in. If we light our lamps and hide them under the tub or basket, then we are only useful to ourselves as individuals and not to our neighbours. When these are enveloped in darkness, they will profess their darkness in such a way that the darkness will overwhelm and extinguish our single light. God wants us to be lit and burning brightly, and also to shine forth our light to everyone around us. Hence, he called his disciples a city built on the mountain top. Maintaining the brightness of our light requires...

TUESDAY, TENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME  1 Kings 17:7-16; Ps 4:2-5,7-8; Mt 5:13-16 Salted by Communion with God Without a constant communion with God, it is impossible to please God always or to be like him. As we have previously noted, God sends His word, which is our daily bread, to establish this daily communion with us and gradually transform us into His likeness. The belief that we become what we eat is true, not only with regard to physical food, but also for spiritual food. Our spiritual food consists of what we fill our minds and set our hearts on daily. The Eternal Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us for this purpose, that the bread of angels may become the bread of men on earth. But it is one thing to serve someone a delicious food, and another thing for the person to have a relish or hunger for the food. By sending His Son in human flesh, God has set a heavenly, delicious, and enriching food and drink before us. Cf. Isa 25:6. We have to work on ourselves to de...

MONDAY, TENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME  1 Kings 17:1-6; Ps 121; Mt 5:1-12 The Blessed Life for All It is the will of God, our Creator and Saviour, for us to have fullness of life and wellbeing. Before the original fall, the knowledge of what would cause our nature and individual life to flourish was part of nature’s endowment. Human reason, with the original grace that God granted to our first parents, gave them enough light to know and do the will of God. Human well-being consists in nothing other than knowing and doing the will of God. But deceived by the tempter to choose what was not consistent with divine will for them, they lost the light of grace and wandered in the darkness of sin and evil. The path leading to life of blessedness was lost to them due to the darkness that enslaved the human will, which caused the loss of God’s guiding light or grace. In other words, the human race knew death by the choice of our first parent against the clear forewarning of God. Blinded b...