7/30/2013 – Tuesday of 17th week of Ordinary Time – St Peter Chrysologus – Bishop and Doctor of the Church – Psalm 103

       When I looked over the readings for today, it was the Psalm that struck me, especially in its response: “The Lord is kind and merciful.”  The psalmist goes on to say that: “The Lord secures justice and the rights of all the oppressed.  Merciful and gracious is the LORD, slow to anger and abounding in kindness.” 

         Our saint of the day is also a Doctor of the Church – St Peter Chrysologus. His name may seem a little odd to us, but the word “Chrysologus” means “golden-tongued” or “golden-worded”.  He was given that name due to the brief and eloquent homilies he used to give.  One might wonder what relevance a bishop from Ravena, Italy who was born at the turn of the 5^th century might have to us in our modern world.  Well, in relationship to the psalm today, Peter Chrysologus asserted that there are three things that we need to practice in our lives of faith that will help our faith remain constant and that will help our virtue and our values to endure.  Those three things are prayer, fasting, and mercy.  These are also the three holy practices that we are called to in the season of Lent in preparation for Easter each year.

         Our God is merciful – we hear this again and again in Sacred Scripture.  Yet, how do we reflect that mercy in our own lives? 

7/31/2012 – Tuesday of 17th week in ordinary time – St Ignatius of Loyola – Jeremiah 14: 17 – 22

          The people of Israel are suffering, yet they are not afraid to ask God why.  They ask God: Have you cast Judah off?  Is Zion loathsome to you?  The people are willing to acknowledge the sins of their fathers and their own sins that they’ve committed against God.  They ask God to remember the covenant that he made with them, to forgive them in honor of his own name.

         We live in a society where so many people are not willing to acknowledge the wrongs that they have done.  It is so much easier to blame the system, to blame someone else, to sue someone, to not take responsibility.  The people were confronting God in the midst of suffering from a great draught.  I wonder if some of the farmers in the Midwest who are losing all of their crops this summer cry out to God in the same way. 

         Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast day we celebrate today, confronted God in this same spirit of honesty.  He was a wounded soldier recuperating in bed when he got the call from the Lord to serve him.  After a conversion of heart and time spent in the wilderness, Ignatius spent time in the seminary at the University of Paris, where he got the idea to start a new order, the Jesuits, which is actually the largest religious order of priests in the world today.  Leaving behind the life of a solider was not easy for him – it meant confronting his demons and the way of life he followed.  Yet, Ignatius stands as a witness today of someone who was able to confront God with great honesty and candor.  May we have the courage to do the same.