23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Our readings for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time are:

1. Wisdom 9: 13-18b
2. Psalms 90: 3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17
3. Philemon 9-10, 12-17
4. Luke 14: 25-33

• If I knew then what I know now ...
• The passage of time usually gives us a different perspective on the present, and perhaps, if we're lucky, we can look back on today and say "it all turned out for the best."
• If you were able to choose between two outcomes, how would you judge which one was the best?
• Would you consider just the impact of that choice on you?
• Include your family?
• Your parish?
• ...
• How do you think God makes such decisions?
• How has He communicated His desires/wishes/dreams for you to you?

• In every age
• We in our mechanistic Western culture tend to have short memories.  Other cultures, like the Jews, are different in that they intentionally and deliberately celebrate, remember, make themselves present in, and through their shared stories.
• What stories of God's faithfulness do you have?
• Who have you shared those stories with?
• Who will share those stores when you are gone?
• What might we, as a community, do about that?

• Taking one for the team
• There is room for depth and greatness in every moment of the Liturgy, and the rest of our lives as well.  The prayers of the faithful can bring us into unity with those suffering in an ever wider, more inclusive, and more effective way if we allow them to.
• How wide is your prayer circle?  Do you pray for anything/anyone outside of your immediate circle of family and friends?
• When was the last time that you felt truly drawn to embrace someone else's need?
• What was it that made you take that risk?
• How did it change you?
• Would you do it again?

• Finding what's important
• As quickly as possible, name the five most important things in your life.
• What do those all share in common?
• How do you tell when something in your life has become a distraction from your life in Jesus?
• How do you shake that attachment?

• Preparation for Reconciliation:

1. How is God guiding me today?
2. How am I celebrating God's faithfulness to me in my life?
3. Where am I reaching out in prayer, in action, in contemplation in my life?
4. What of my life truly makes my essence?

Spiritual Beings Having a Physical Experience

To term death "throwing off this mortal coil"
Makes our demise sound like a liberation.
I prefer to think of it as a homecoming.

A mystic once said that our problem is simply this:
We see ourselves as physical beings occasionally having a spiritual experience.
But actually, we are spiritual beings, currently having a physical experience.

Not too long ago, a person's education was not complete,
Until they had made the grand tour through Europe,
Drunk from the wellsprings of Western civilization

See works of art, hear music unavailable elsewhere.
Learn the cultures that contribute to what it meant to be Western,
And bring all of that home again, transformed, and larger then when you left.

Revelation pours forth through, in and through creation every moment.
This time we have here is privileged, an abundant gift like no other.
To see God's face in ways seen nowhere else.

So sad that we lose the forest for the trees,
Mistake creation for the creator,
Latch on to managing the properties and so miss the play.

Lord, make my vision ever larger.
Broaden my heart and give it the courage.
To greet each day with open-eyed wonder and reckless desire.

Shalom!