Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A
Reflecting on Mt 16: 21-27
Today, on this feast of St. Augustine, it’s good to read some of the things he had to say about today’s difficult Gospel:
We know what great things love can accomplish, even though it is often base and sensual. We know what hardships people have endured, what intolerable indignities they have borne to attain the object of their love. What we love indicates the sort of people we are, and therefore making a decision about this should be our one concern in choosing a way of life.
How absolutely brilliant, and yet so simple. Figure out what (and whom) you love, and then choose your way of life. Any career, any lifestyle will have its struggles, but if you choose a life in Christ you can be sure that it will come with a cross fit just for you.
My mind goes to images of Jesuits tied to rafts and sent over waterfalls in South America. I can also conjure up stories of the great suffering of Catholic missionaries imprisoned in China for decades, or Franciscan Father Maximilian Kolbe offering to die in place of a stranger at Auschwitz.
But of course the real crosses are the daily ones, the aggravating ones, the ones that form us and give clarity to our decisions about whether we will make eye contact with that guy holding the sign on the corner, or pick up the phone when the lonely neighbor calls again.
What cross do you pick up and carry with love because of WHOM you love? Let’s talk about it together here on the website.
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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).