October 3rd

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Thursday, October 3, 2019                                                                             Neh 8:1-12; Lk 10:1-12 _______________________________________________________________________________

The Lord appointed seventy-two others whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit. He said to them, “The harvest is abundant but the labors are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest. Go on your way; behold, I am sending you like lambs among wolves.” Lk 10:1-3

When the memory of the history of salvation wrought by Jesus becomes a simple recollection for a Christian, he loses sight of one of the fundamental principles of the Christian faith: memory becomes joy. We all have the memory of salvation, assured Pope Francis. But one might ask: “is this memory close to us? Or is it a distant memory, a bit diffused, a bit archaic, as if it were in a museum?”. When the memory is not close to us, when we no longer experience the memory, it slowly turns into “a mere recollection”.

“When a memory comes,” Pope Francis said, “it does two things: it warms the heart and gives us joy”. Instead, “a memory that has been subdued, which moves away and becomes a mere recollection, it does not warm the heart, and gives us neither joy nor strength”. The encounter with memory “is an event of salvation, an encounter with the love of God who has made history with us and has saved us. It is so beautiful that we have been saved, and we must celebrate this”. The Church makes her memory, the memory of the Passion of the Lord, which we are about to remember now. The Lord himself told us: Do this in memory of me. This means that we are close to the memory of the Church, which is the presence of the Lord in front of us. (Morning meditation on Thursday, October 3, 2013)

A religious woman from Slovakia, Sister Veronica Teresa Rackova, SSpS, in one interview about her mission in South Sudan said, “I've never met people in my life who have suffered so much. I believe that God loves them very much. He sends me to them so that they can really feel his love and trust Him even more. He is our Savior and He comes to deliver us from the yoke of sin and slavery, to be free children and to have a life in abundance. In this mission, I am also increasingly aware of Jesus' mission in the sense of following Him to the summit of Calvary with the hope of resurrection and eternal life. He molds me in all situations and I believe that He is always with me.” How true are these words! They are fulfilled when she returned home after midnight after taking a woman to another hospital. She was the target of gunfire and died. However, the twins born to the woman being transported to the hospital received a great gift. They will grow up knowing that they are so valuable that someone risked their life for their lives.

Even today the Lord sends his faithful ones to prepare his way until He will sit on the throne of a human's heart. Do you prepare his way? In what ways do you do this in your family, at work, among your neighbors?

“Christianity is not a set of truths to be trusted and laws to follow. This would be something very repulsive about Christianity. Christianity is a person who loves me very much and who longs and desires my love.”                       St. Oscar Romero