Reflection from Friar Nicholas

TUESDAY, TWENTY SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 2:10-16; Ps 145:8-14; Lk 4:31-37 Coming of the Holy One of God Our responsorial psalm says that the Lord is just in all his ways. The justice of God is enshrined in his holiness, which we have understood as God’s consecration to himself. God cannot be other than himself, and everything he does is rooted in right reason and truth. He is the source of holiness, for he maintains everything in its respective nature and orderliness. The creatures sing the praises of God through their operations, which showcase their different natures and the orderliness of the universe. The order and proportionality in the universe witness to the wisdom with which God made all things. “All your creatures shall thank you, O Lord, and your friends shall repeat their blessing. They shall speak of the glory of your reign and declare your might, O God, to make known to men your mighty deeds and the glorious splendour of your reign.” The friends of God repe...

MONDAY, TWENTY SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Cor 2:1-5; Ps 119:97-102; Lk 4:16-30 The Anointing from God We are already familiar with the fact that God has invited each of us to eternal communion with him in heaven. We will keep repeating it to spur ourselves on the journey. We have also noted that communion has already begun here when we made a profession of faith in his Son, Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind. The sacrament of our communion with God is the Church, into which we have entered by our baptismal profession of faith in Christ. The guarantee and reality of the same communion within each of us and in the Church is the Holy Spirit, who prepares us, individually and collectively as the Church of God, for the fulfilment of the promised communion in heaven. The major work of the Holy Spirit is what he does within each of us; using every means possible, he transforms our minds and hearts into those of Jesus Christ. By doing this, he brings our spirits to the maturity of ...

SUNDAY, TWENTY SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Jer 20:7-9; Ps 63:2-6,8-9; Rom 12:1-2; Mt 16:21-27 Our Natural Attraction to God The reason discovering or knowing the will of God and doing it is so difficult for us is the presence of sin in us. Sin exists as a disorientation within each of us, a desire that is different and impedes what ought to be our natural desire for God that God planted in every nature as coming from him. This disorientation, or desire to go against the natural, becomes a second nature within us as we follow its pull in our daily activities. The presence of this disorientation constitutes receptivity in us for suggestions or instigations of the devil. The presence of this tendency witnesses to the fact of original sin and its effect on us. But the fact that God made us in his image means that the original and natural orientation to God and to all that is natural lies within each of us. The disorientation of sin cannot destroy the original structure and orientati...

THE BEHEADING OF SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST 1 Cor 1:26-31; Ps 33:12-13,18-21; Mk 6:17-29 The Essence of the Heavenly Tradition The heart or core value that defines the heavenly tradition is God-centredness. The Gospel tradition teaches the supremacy of the knowledge of God the Father and love for Him. We are trained in the holy tradition to prefer the will of the Father in all things and reject our own sinful will. The training commences from the very day we encounter Jesus Christ personally and make our profession of faith in him. To make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ is to have received divine light from the Father as Peter did when he confessed the identity of the Son of Man. Hence, such enlightenment from the Father is a privileged invitation to follow Jesus Christ, the sole teacher of mankind. We sin any time we leave the light of our faith in Jesus Christ to follow our own or worldly light; to desire to do our own will and not follow the teaching of Jesus Christ is to g...

SAINT AUGUSTINE, BISHOP, DOCTOR 1 Jn 4:7-16; Ps 119:9-14; Mt 23:8-12 You have Only One Teacher We celebrate Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose life holds so many lessons for us. In his life, we see what is required to learn and live out the heavenly tradition. He was not born a saint, but a sinner like any of us. Conceived and born in sin, he was drawn to a sinful lifestyle like ours, and he let his soul drink in vanity, becoming vain in his thoughts and life. It is always true that we become what we desire and love; for desire is love in flight to its object. By desire we conceive a thing and become one with it in loving it. Therefore, we are gradually transformed into the likeness of what we desire and love. Such is the operation of God’s image in each of us. God is in all things by his infinite and creative power, but man is all things by knowledge and love. The power to know and to love comes from God, for we understand the human intellect and will as spiritual powers. They are ...

SAINT MONICA 1 Cor 1:1-9; Ps 145:2-7; Mt 24:42-51 The Riches of Heavenly Tradition The true tradition of the Church of Jesus Christ is the Gospel tradition. It is a heavenly tradition because its source is God. We do not just imbibe the heavenly tradition by baptism at the profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Our baptism is rather the beginning of our inculturation into the heavenly culture and tradition. The commencement of this inculturation is not merely the ritual of baptism, but the truthful confession of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Just as we heard him say to Peter at his confession of faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, ‘Upon this rock I will build my Church,’ our inculturation into the Gospel tradition begins with our genuine confession of faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. The features that make our confession genuine are the acknowledgment of our sins and our nothingness without God, sincere sorrow, repentance, confession of our sins to him, and a true re...

WEDNESDAY, TWENTY FIRST WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 2 Thess 3:6-10,16-18; Ps 128:1-2,4-5; Mt 23:27-32 The Earthly and Heavenly Traditions What are traditions? Traditions are informally understood as the various ways of doing things and living day-to-day that we have received from our ancestors. Traditions are constituted from peoples’ customs, values, worldviews, and belief systems. They form part of a people's cultural heritage. Within every tradition we encounter the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is part of the tradition that is genuinely human and general, in the sense that it is found in every human tradition. The bad is part of the tradition that accrued from the experiences of the people which were wrongly understood and resolved; the responses to such misunderstood experiences are codified and passed to subsequent generations. The ugly aspect of traditions is made up of aberrations of our nature which are evil and results of sin and sinful attachments to demons. The ugly a...