I love the imagery we have in our
Gospel reading, about a fishing net full of all kinds of fish, in which the
fisherman sorts out the good from the bad. This image is compared to our eternal life, when the righteous will be separated
from the wicked. And what we value here
on earth and judge to be worthy might be very different from the criteria God
uses. In Ecuador, we used to eat this
fish that had a very tough skin on it and that had to be smoked over a wooden
fire and marinated for several days before it could be cooked and eaten. It was the shredded and when it was served
the consistency was similar to pulled pork.
It was not until the end of my time in Ecuador that I realized that I
was eating stingray. It was once
considered a junk fish by the people, more often thrown out than eaten, but it
later became a prized delicacy.
There are only 35 Doctors of the
Church, valued for their writings and their enduring contributions to the development
of our faith. Today, we celebrate
another Doctor of the Church: St Alphonsus Liguori, the founder of the Redemptorists, an influential
men’s religious congregation in the Catholic Church. Liguori lived in the 18th
century. His greatest contribution to
the faith is his system of moral theology, which avoided both laxity and strict
legalism. He tried to form a system of
moral theology that provided a practical way of dealing with the moral issues
that we human beings face in our daily lives.
This is one quote I particularly like of his: “He who puts his trust in
himself is lost. He who trusts in God
can do all things.”
As we place our trust in God, as we
make decisions big and small to follow the values of our faith in our daily
lives, may we strive toward the path of righteousness.
