Saturday 18TH Week In Ordinary Time

Hold your eyes on God and leave the doing to him. That is all the doing you have to worry about-Saint Jean Frances Chantal

Deut: 6:4-13
Matt.17:14-20

From a great depression to a great peace of mind. St. Jean Frances De Chantal who was a widow with six children through the spiritual direction of St. Francis De Sales, began to work with women who were attracted to religious life, but not the austere kind of that age. She founded the Congregation of the Visitation and when she died at the age of 69 she had established about 85 monasteries.She once said that; “love is more perfect if we see and love God in our neighbor because in this way God will be loved above all else, and our neighbor as much as the love of God demands.”

Love has many sides. Love involves feeling and the decision to reach out to the other. We see In today’s first reading from the book of Deuteronomy that Moses told the people: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your strength. It is a love in totality. It encompasses feelings that must be expressed in action, and strengthened constantly with decisions. Yet, like the mustard seed that Jesus used as imagery in today’s Gospel, love has to grow. How we understand love in our younger days, we understand love now in much deeper ways. To say that we love God might be quite easy, as in our love for God is solely confined to feelings. Now we know that our love for God must be experienced in love for others, and that is much more difficult.

There are mountains of depression, hostility, bitterness, anger, disappointment, and so on to move. But as long as we love God, these mountains can be moved. Then we will understand that love is not only a feeling but as an action as well as a decision. Do you seek to love God with your whole being (spiritually, emotionally, and physically) and all that it takes? Let us pray for that interior intentionality, today and the willingness to act upon it in risky, loving actions, “for nothing will be impossible for you.”

Fr Joseph Osho