We recognize how we live in an age where the motives behind our faith are questioned by many in society, as many do not want believe that we are sincere and grounded in our faith. That thought came to my mind with what Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel: “Blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.” Being able to believe in our modern world is a grace from God. It is not something that comes from ourselves alone. It is a fruit from a gift we receive from God. Our faith would not exist without God and the Holy Spirit interacting in our lives in a very real way.
All of us have an exterior journey in life: the job we go to each day, the different activities that we have, the errands we run, the tasks we attend to, the way we spend our leisure time and our down time, the way we try to be productive each day, the way we serve others. But we also have an interior journey, a spiritual journey, the journey of the soul, of how we process our experiences, our encounters with others, our joys and our sorrows. By God’s grace, we travel down these exterior and interior journeys of life.
On our faith journey, the saints are such a great example for us. Within the community of saints, the Doctors of the Church represent those men and women who have blessed us with teachings and writings that help us on our journey of faith. Lawrence of Brindisi, who was born in 1559 in Florence, Italy in the midst of the Protestant Reformation is the saint of the day. Lawrence was known for his gift of languages, able to speak and read in his native Italian as well as Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Bohemian, Spanish, and French. He was ordained a priest in the Franciscan Capuchin order at the age of 23. With his gift for languages, he studied the Bible in its original texts. At the request of Pope Clement VIII, he preached to the Jews in Italy. His ability to speak Hebrew was so good that many rabbis thought that Lawrence himself was a Jew who had converted to Christianity. He was a gifted diplomat who was dispatched to different foreign diplomatic trips. In fact, he died on one of those diplomatic trips in Portugal in 1619 on his 60th birthday. He was also minister general of the Capuchin order, overseeing great growth and expansion of that order. His sermons and writings on Scripture take up 15 volumes; they are still considered classics today. He was named a Doctor of the Church in 1959 by Pope John XXIII. One other interesting fact about him - his remain are found at a Poor Clares’ convent in the village of Villafranca del Bierzo, one the the towns on the Camino pilgrimage trail in Spain. I am not sure of the circumstances of how his remains came to be there. Let us unite our prayers with the prayers of St Lawrence Brindisi today.
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