When I first became a missionary way
back in 1992, I headed up to the city of Winnipeg, Canada where I worked with
the poor and with street people in a soup kitchen located in the inner
city. The first time I visited the soup
kitchen was right before Christmas – several hundred people were gathered
together in a rather cramped old building to share a meal and to praise God
together. When one of the soup kitchen
workers asked what song they wanted to sing, immediately one of the street
people shouted out: “Amazing Grace.” Those
gathered together at the soup kitchen were certainly considered the most lowly
in that society – most were homeless people, prostitutes, or drug addicts. Yet, their voices rose up in thanksgiving as
they sang to the Lord: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch
like me.” They came to God in their
poverty and humility, in the harsh, raw circumstances of their daily
lives. It amazed me how joyfully they
praised God in the midst of their misery and suffering.
The psalmist today tells us – “The Lord
hears the cry of the poor,” but what does that really mean? In our first reading, we hear from the wise
teachings of Ben Sirach; he lived a couple of centuries before the birth of
Jesus. Sirach, originally from
Jerusalem, ran a school for privileged Jewish youth in Alexandria, Egypt, a
great center of learning in the ancient world.
Even though his students were from the most elite Jewish families, he
reminded them that God did not automatically hear their prayers just because of
their privileged status in society. God
also hears the cry of the poor and has a special love for them.
We are all called to come to God poor
in spirit, meaning that we’re not come with a sense of righteousness or
haughtiness. We do not want to have the
pride and arrogance of the Pharisee who prayed to God in today’s Gospel. If we come to God focused on ourselves, on
our accomplishments and sense of entitlement just like that Pharisee, then we
will fail to see the many ways that God is at work in own lives. If we fail to humbly approach God in our
prayers, then we will fail to realize that all we do and all we are starts
with him. In our poverty of spirit,
we’re called to humbly place our reliance and trust in God, not on our own
individual identities, not on our own accomplishments. We are to come to God knowing that our
goodness doesn’t begin in ourselves, but we receive our goodness from God, the
source of all goodness in creation.
We have been celebrating Respect Life Month
in our parish this entire month of October.
Perhaps the significance of this month will help us understand what the
cry of the poor is all about. If we
listen to the political rhetoric of our day, to talk radio, or to popular
culture, often we see human life given very little respect. Yet, our Catholic faith declares without
reservation that we’re to respect human life from the moment of conception to
the moment of natural death – this includes the unborn fetus in the womb, those
who in the last stages of life from old age or terminal illness, those who are
in prison or on death row, those who are unemployed or struggling to make it to
the next day. Being witnesses of the
respect for life in our modern society is an important way we can hear the cry
of the poor.
Besides this being Respect Life Month,
we observe October as World Mission Month as designated by our Church’s Society
for the Propagation of the Faith. As
Catholics, we are all called to pledge our commitment to our Church’s
missionary activity throughout the world, through our prayers and our
sacrifices. Not only is having a heart
for the missions an important part of our Catholic faith, we can support our
mission to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ in many different ways. St Therese of Lisieux, whose feast day is
celebrated on October 1, is a great witness to the importance of the missionary
spirit within our Church. Therese spent
her entire time as a nun living in a convent in a small town in France, dying
at the young age of 24. She never went
off to a faraway place to be a missionary herself, yet Pope John Paul II named
her as one of the patron saints of the missions because of her love of the missions,
for the many prayers and letters she wrote in support of missionaries
throughout the world. The love of St.
Therese for the missions reminds us that there are so many little things that
we can do in our lives to help God’s kingdom grow and grow.
As we think about the cry of the poor
that we’re all called to hear, as we think about the month of October that
recognizes the respect we’re to have for all human life, as we recognize the
importance of a missionary spirit within our Church, let us remember the
humility of the tax collector in today’s Gospel, how he humbly placed himself
in God’s hands, how he surrendered himself to God’s will. May we seek God’s blessing in our lives just
as the tax collector sought His blessing.
And may we pass on those blessings to others in a humble, gentle spirit.
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