9-28-2022.pdf

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Five Important Spiritual Thoughts from the Liturgy of the Word

…and follow up for the Secular Franciscan

September 22 – September 28

 

1 — He kept trying to see him. (Lk 9:9)**

…Do I keep “how
Jesus would think, act and say” as the guide to my life?

 

 

2 — “But
who do you say that I am?” (Lk 9:20)**

Extended meditation:

This question of the Gospel is among
the five or so most important questions that we must ask ourselves as we
develop our own spirituality:

Who
do you say that I am? that is,

Who
do we say Jesus Christ is?

It is among the
most important spiritual questions because depending on our answer, we develop
our approach to Jesus, and we direct our spiritual lives—rightly or wrongly. The truth of faith, as Peter says in this
portion of the Gospel, is that Jesus is the Lord of our lives, the living and
true God, the person that we must pattern ourselves after, the way, the truth
and the life…and measure how we are doing by studying what we are doing in
comparison to Jesus’s life.

In answer to the
question of who Jesus is for us, many have said for example that Jesus for them
is someone who punishes evil and punishes evil people. And in that case, Jesus becomes a God who
condemns—and these people form their religion in that light. When they do, there is anger and hatred and
what they might call “justifiable” revenge.
That is not a very good picture of who Jesus Christ is, and therefore
religion is not a pleasant thing at all for them, or for the others they meet.

Still others have answered that Jesus
is someone who is not real because they see so many people who are hypocritical
in the Church or in religion. Or because
they have had things go wrong for them in one way or another. Every Christian and certainly every Franciscan
in our world is called to answer this question in light of our Christian
faith. The truth is that Jesus is Lord,
the way, the truth and the life, the Lord contained in the Scriptures that we
read, God who gives real hope to our world.

Jesus is the pattern. That is, we accept as our guideline of
living, the Gospels of Sacred Scripture, that is, the actions and words of
Jesus, and as best we can, His thinking in individual cases. Jesus is the measure. We look at our actions and words over a
significant amount of time, say our past lives, and we study, say on a scale of
1-10, how close we came to the pattern that Jesus gave us.

Catholic Christians, and those of us
who follow Francis of Assisi, in the past have made the Institution of the
Eucharist as one of the most important actions that the Lord performed. In exactly the same way, and for the same
reason—making the Lord present—are the words, actions and thoughts of Jesus
throughout the Gospels.

We must begin to see that the Gospels
are not a “proof” that the Christian religion is the true religion or the like. The Gospels are just as much the real
presence as Jesus in the Eucharist.

And so, we must take the time to study
the person of Jesus and how he acted with regard to love, anger, prayer, mental
and physical pain, being a disciple, and so forth, and accept how Jesus
behaved. That is, we ask WWJS, what
would Jesus say, WWJD, what would Jesus do, and as far as possible WWJT, what
would Jesus think—and apply it to our lives.

 

 

3 – “But you, man of God, pursue
righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness.” (1 Tim 6:11)

…Go through each of
these virtues, asking myself about how I am keeping them.

 

 

4 – “An argument arose among the disciples about which of them was
the greatest. Jesus
realized the intention of their hearts.” (Lk 9:46-47)**

…Is jealousy of
others a problem in my life?

 

 

5 – “I will follow you wherever you go.” (Lk 9:57)

…Such is my
profession as a Franciscan. Do I mean
it?

 

 

** one of the most important quotes in the Gospels

 

092122.pdf

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Five Important Spiritual Thoughts from the Liturgy of the Word

…and follow up for the Secular Franciscan

September 15 – September 21

 

 

1 — “Woman, behold your Son.” (John 19:26)**

…Am I truly following “Mary’s prime directive” to study carefully the attitude of Jesus and adopt it in my life?

 

 

2 –“Accompanying him were the Twelve and some women.” (Lk 8:1-2)**

GOD DON’T MAKE JUNK

To Jesus, everyone is important.

We must all listen to that teaching. In the Gospels, Jesus is actually making everyone think by getting them to look closely at what they were doing.

Evil does not like that. The devil, or Satan, or however we look at the dark side of life would much rather cause dissension and chaos by making us feel that we are better than someone else and hiding the fact from ourselves.

That fact—that everyone is important—was brought home to me in a striking way a number of years ago. Thinking that I knew something about his school, the administrator of a school asked me to speak to his teenagers about rock music. Since I had done it a number of times in other schools, I said “yes” to his request. The administrator met me at the door, and I realized immediately that it was not a regular school at all. I noticed first of all that there were severely handicapped young people in wheelchairs around the hallway. Then he took me to a ward, a very big room, with portable beds around the walls, and nothing in the main body of the room. My talk on leadership and music involves activity, eye-contact, and there was nothing like that. I was totally distressed and embarrassed, completely out of sync with what I wanted to do. I rushed through the presentation, and afterwards, wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could, knowing that I had failed in my efforts miserably.

But before I left, the administrator told me that one of the young people wanted to talk to me, and so I followed him to a little alcove where there were five or six young people in wheelchairs who could not talk at all. They were in front of computers, and the way they “talked” was by using a head band with a pointer, hitting the computer and writing to me what they wanted to say. The young man realized how uncomfortable I was, and he wrote his message: “Thank you for coming. Don’t feel bad. Remember—God don’t make junk.” It was difficult to keep from crying: here was a person whom many in our society consider “junk” telling me that just because I did not think that I did well on a program, that I was not junk.

God don’t make junk. From the most insignificant person who died during this minute to the child who was just conceived by a man and a woman, everyone is important because God don’t make junk.

One of the movies that I think everyone should see is “Seabiscuit,” the story of a horse who could have been junk, and turned out to be a magnificent animal. One line keeps going through the movie that is very apropos here and something that we can learn from: “You don’t throw away a whole life just because it’s banged up a little.”

 

 

3 — You cannot serve both God and mammon.” (Lk 16:13)**

…Has the things of this world taken on more importance for me than the things of heaven?

 

 

4 — “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.” (Lk 8:21)**

…For a Franciscan, a daily reading of Scripture is a must.

 

 

5 — He who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will himself also call and not be heard. (Proverbs 21:13)

…Francis was concerned about the poor around him; am I as concerned as I should be about the poor around me?

Sept-8-14-2022.pdf

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Five Important Spiritual Thoughts from the Liturgy of the Word

…and follow up for the Secular Franciscan

September 8 – September 14

 

1 — “And they shall name him Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.” (Mt 1:23)**

Extended meditation:

Limiting
myself to just the 2000’s, the song that stands out the most for me as having
the message of the Resurrection is The Fray’s song “You Found Me.” It is an incredible song for popular
music. It states outright that God is in
charge of life, but often we do not feel that way. In the end, however, God will help us in the
situations in which we find ourselves.
They sing, “I found God on the corner of First and Amistad, all
alone, smoking his last cigarette. I
said, ‘Where you been?’ He said, ‘Ask anything.'” And so the person in the song asks,
“Where were you when everything was falling apart? All my days were spent by the telephone. It never rang, and all I needed was a
call.” But he sings, “Lost and
insecure, you found me, you found me lyin’ on the floor, surrounded. Why’d you have to wait? Where were you? Just a little late, you found me.” God will find us no matter what the
circumstances.

Isaac Slade, a member of
the group The Fray, says this about the song. “‘You Found Me’ is a tough song
for me. It’s about the disappointment,
the heart ache, the let-down that comes with life. Sometimes you’re let down, sometimes you’re
the one who lets someone else down. It
gets hard to know who you can trust, who you can count on. This song came out of a tough time, and I’m
still right in the thick of it. There’s
some difficult circumstances my family and friends have been going through over
the past year or so and can be overwhelming.
It wears on me. It demands so
much of my faith to keep believing, keep hoping in the unseen. Sometimes the tunnel has a light at the end,
but usually they just look black as night.
This song is about that feeling, and the hope that I still have, buried
deep in my chest.” For him, the
song is a statement of faith in God, even though things are not going the way
he wishes.

To me, that is the fundamental
meaning of Emmanuel. We realize that we
need someone to help us in our way of life, and then we discover such a
person. We know that we need God, but
often it seems that God is not part of what we are all about. The Christian and therefore the Franciscan
believes that Jesus Christ who is the Son of God actually came to our earth,
and showed us the way out of the misery that we can get ourselves into, giving
us the opportunity of having eternal life.
As The Fray sings, God found us, and the Christian believes that God with
us, that is, Jesus, led us to life, both here and hereafter.

 

 

2 – “No,
I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I
myself should be disqualified.” (1 Corinthians 9:27)

…The Franciscan preaches without saying
words. Is my “preaching” what it should
be?

 

 

3 – “Remove the wooden
beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly.” (Lk 6:41)**

…Am I seeing clearly?

 

 

4 — “I tell you, not
even in Israel have I found such faith.”
(Lk 7:9)**

The faith of the centurion should make me
stronger in my faith in Jesus.

 

 

5 – “For
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes
in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” (John 3:16)**

Does my belief in Jesus “show” itself to others?

** one of the most important passages of the Gospels

Five Important Spiritual Thoughts from the Liturgy of the Word

…and follow up for the Secular Franciscan

August 17 – August 24

 

 

1 — “You shall be my people, and I will
be your God.” (Ezekiel 36:28)

…As I study my life
yesterday, is it clear that I have truly chosen God?

 

 

2 – “Many
are invited, but few are chosen.” (Mt 22:14)**

Extended meditation

In
his story, Jesus tells those who have not put on the wedding garment that they
are not “chosen.” What does it mean “to
be chosen”? Looked at as the ending of
Jesus’s story, it might mean that those who are “chosen” will celebrate eternal
life with God. Looked at from the point
of view of “right now,” it probably means that the person who is “chosen” will
do the best that he/she can do given the circumstances, the definition of the
spiritual life, and therefore the Franciscan’s way of life.

The minister called
it the most interesting story that he had ever heard. He was a part-time chaplain at a local
hospital. A person whose profession was
a rodeo clown had come into the emergency room and had been immediately
hospitalized with an extremely serious infection in his leg. Having suffered it during a performance in
another town, he finally had to come to the hospital to try to have it
treated. Unfortunately, the infection
was so pronounced that the man died within a matter of days. Since the man had no family according to the
records, the minister located the rodeo which had already moved to another
town, informing them of the death. One
person, likewise a rodeo clown came back to his funeral. He was the only mourner as they buried the
man.

He
told the minister the story. The mourner
who came back to the funeral had been a policeman, a man very talented in law
enforcement who had managed to destroy a major drug operation in a southern
United States city. But he paid the
price. Although his family was in
protection, the drug cartel had managed to murder them all—his wife and two
children—burned their home, and left the policeman despondent and ready to end
his life.

He
had already given notice that he would retire from the police force, and really
had no plans for the future except to live his life in misery. His captain had given him easy duty on his
last day—watching a stoplight at a major intersection in the city. What happened at that stoplight changed his
life, and inspired him to become a person who “made people laugh while saving
lives” as he described it.

A
comedy magician in a crazily painted car approached that stoplight during the
policeman’s last day at work. The
magician was late for a performance, and had already put his oversize shoes on
as he approached the intersection. When
he went to brake the car, suddenly his shoe caught, then slipped off the brake
and hit the accelerator. The car went
flying through the intersection. Luckily
there were no other cars at that time, but the policeman knew that he had to
approach the vehicle which had suddenly stopped when the man finally found the
brakes.

When
he approached the car, he saw a thoroughly distraught man made up as a clown
for his performance. Because of his
sudden stop after his flight through the intersection, a number of his gimmicks
that he used in his show had “gone off.”
There were plastic snakes moving all over the car, shot out of a two toy
guns which had been discharged when the guns hit the floor. There was wild music coming out of the tape recorder
in the back seat that had been programmed to play when there was a sudden jerk
to the machine. And when the policeman
had asked the man to roll down the window, the comedian knew what would happen
with the tape recorder because after the wild music, it was set up to deliver
the sentence, “You are the most handsome man on the face of the earth.”

The
policeman-turned-rodeo clown told the minister that he began to laugh for the
first time since his family’s death. He
laughed so hard that he barely could tell the comedy magician to leave. He began to understand some things about his
life. He later found the magician, and
thanked him for saving his life. He told
him that he had inspired him to save people’s lives while making them
laugh. He later became a rodeo clown to
do exactly that.

In
fact, both of them became close friends and joined the rodeo together as rodeo
clowns. The man who died was the comedy
magician rodeo clown, and the policeman attested that the man had saved his
life. At the end of their lives both
policeman and magician had moved into a path of love and chosen a future of
showing love toward others.

They
both understood what it meant “to be chosen.”

 

 

3 — The greatest among you must be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled;
but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (Mt 23:11-12)**

Extended meditation:

In this chapter in Matthew’s Gospel,
Jesus is speaking about the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of his day. Hypocrisy is an interesting phenomenon to
talk about. It is an automatic trap or problem area for anyone who gives
direction to others: priests, ministers, teachers, parents, legislators, anyone
showing leadership of others. In our case as Franciscans, it is anyone who
chooses to do something good that others see, and therefore anyone understands
the importance of God in our lives. For whatever reason, we say to the world:
“I believe in God through Jesus Christ.” We must listen to Jesus in the Gospel
today. It is possible to say ‘I believe’, and not put it into practice.

We should be very interested in what we
say in Church. We say strong words during the service, words like, we believe,
we will, we do. We must truly listen to what we say and do. We
receive the Lord in the words of the Gospel and in the Eucharist. How can
someone receive the Lord and with the same mouth tear down someone else or
allow foul language to come out of it? How can someone receive the Lord and
continue a life-style that makes a shambles of a marriage or parenting? How can
we miss the sacredness of life itself by being bitter and angry most of the
time? Or refusing to see the good in life?

How?—according to Jesus, we have
allowed religion to be nothing more than something to be seen or performed.

What’s the antidote to hypocrisy, how
do we stay away from it? This Gospel gives us that as well. Jesus says:

The greatest among you must be your
servant.

Service—we have
heard that before from Jesus, in fact a number of times. The way to keep
ourselves from the hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another is to work
on behalf of others. Serve people, give to them without expecting anything in
return, make others feel important because they are—really.

By the very fact that we say we believe
in God, by the very fact that we have professed to be a Franciscan, we are
making a statement to the world outside. We must realize that we could be
hypocrites… or if we carry through, we could be people who are helping this
world.

 

 

4 — “Strive
to enter through the narrow gate” (Luke 13:24)**

…Is
daily discipline of some type part of my Franciscan life?

 

 

5 — “Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, you hypocrites.” (Mt 23:13)**

…Do
I tend to criticize others when I’m doing the same thing myself?

 

 

 

** one of the most
important passages of the Gospels