TWENTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - OCTOBER 6, 2024

TWENTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

As humans, we desire to encounter the Divine in our own lives because we look at the world in which we live and consider it mundane or temporal. If there is a God and He loves His creation, we want to experience that love as intimately as possible. When God remains apparently silent to our prayers or inactive in our undertakings, we struggle to hold onto our faith. Our mistake in such cases is not realizing how God invites us to participate in His Divinity: He went so far as to become one of us in the person of Jesus Christ to indicate how this world, and also how we, play a role in the communication between Heaven and Earth.

READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE

Take a look at your life and consider your greatest desires, your greatest goals, and your greatest achievements. The most important among all of them is your sanctity and the sanctity you instill in those for whom you are responsible; in a family, our greatest strengths and weaknesses are brought to the forefront because we are no longer living for ourselves, and we actually become responsible for the well-being of others. For most of us, the impetus for such a life begins with marriage, choosing one person to be the recipient of our love so that it may multiply throughout our lives for others. We can misunderstand marriage in a few ways: first, we might consider it only a social expectation that we ought to do simply because everyone else does it. Second, we might mistake the attraction or even the infatuation that exists at the beginning of a romantic relationship for love itself. Third, we might focus so much on the other person that we deify them, ignoring our responsibility to love our neighbors or to love God also. In each of these cases, we take something divinely ordained and debase it into something mundane or temporal. In reality, marriage is the perfect reflection of our relationship with God in Heaven; God the Son became man to entwine Himself eternally to what would become His Heavenly Bride - the Church. That marriage was consummated on the cross when Christ was stabbed in his side and blood and water spilled forth, an image prefigured in the creation of Eve who was brought forth into this world through the side of her husband Adam. This is how we participate in the Divine in this world: we must reflect the Wedding Feast in Heaven by participating in the Church here on earth, either in the community of believers at the sacrifice of Mass or in the Domestic Church, the family, loving our spouses and sanctifying our children.