May the Lord bless you with peace and health in the Holy Spirit.
It is 04th October 2021. The Lord is spotted between life and living.
We celebrate the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the Seraphic Father, our model, inspiration, intercessor, the example of poverty, humility, simplicity, and purity. He is the patron of ecology and a loving saint who inspires and instil the peace and serenity of God by bringing us closer to one another and especially to our extended relationship with creation. Lord make me an instrument of peace is a prayer that is attributed to him resonates with all that he stood and lived for. He did not lecture on the poor but became poor and embraced Lady Poverty as little Poverello.
“God called me through His grace and chose to reveal His Son in me.” Encounter, experience, and Expression depict about the Another Christ, St. Francis. The call not just to pair with God but to repair the temple in ruin. Lord, make me an instrument of justice, truth, peace, love, and mercy.
The world is seeking joy in vain; it longs for the peace of mind; if we would love the Lord like you true happiness they’d find.”
The Gospel was his path, blade of grass was his violin, the poor are his wings of prayer and penance, and lovingly calling everyone and everything as brothers and sisters. The magnanimity of his heart was magnified in being lesser and minor as a person who urges us to maximize the resources by sharing with the needy and the poor.
It is a lifelong endeavour to look for the Lord in the least, the ignored, the forgotten, the small, the vulnerable and the broken people and celebrating them in the spotlight of creation.
We reflect on Nehemiah 2:1-8 and Luke 9:57-62. The first reading offers us a new mind-set, when we are doing the work of the Lord. We wonder many times that why God is asking me to do this work for God. God finds a right person to accomplish God’s work. No matter how challenging a job could be, if it is for the purpose of God, one must not hesitate to ask for success.
Nehemiah demonstrated this. No fear or guilt must become more powerful than God. Every job entrusted to us with the purpose. God will achieve it anyway. We just need to cooperate with God. Accomplishing the job entrusted to us belongs to God. On our part, we must continue to submit ourselves in prayer before we ask for favours from God.
The Gospel invites us to follow Jesus. Three persons wanted to follow Jesus. All three of them have an intimate emotional attachment with the family.
One wants a comfortable home to care for, another wants a moral duty to be accomplished and another has a sentimental attachment to the family. Jesus demands a complete detachment.
Jesus wants us to leave the comforts, the family duty, and the attachments whether it is emotional, cultural or sentimental attachment to our family of origin. These things make us to love God less over time. “Once the hand is laid on the plough, no one who looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” (Lk.9:62). May God bless you to follow Jesus.
Let us ask the Lord for the courage to love people as they are and to deal with our strange behaviours in showing our love to others and avoid by all means to treat others as a stranger, a foreigner or unwanted. Wishing you all a happy feast of St. Francis of Assisi. God bless you.