Good morning. We tend to focus a great deal of our time and energy on attending to our safety and well-being. It is possible to overemphasize our need for things that provide for our well-being in this life that we lose sight of those things which provide for our next life. It isn’t that we don’t have enough but that we usually always want more. We tend to always fear those things our Lord assures us we have no need to fear. In today’s Gospel He assures us that with Him in our lives we have no reason to fear for anything.
Servant of God Fulton J. Sheen once suggested that “unless souls are saved, nothing is saved.” He suggested that unless we are attending to matters of eternal security, then temporal things will offer no real security or peace for us. It seems that we increasingly have these things wrong side out. We seem to be so anxious and occupied with providing for our temporal security, to the point of often times missing those things for which we are attempting to secure. What is it they say “One hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, how big my house was, or what kind of car I drove. But the world may be a little better, because I was important in the life of a child.”
As a counselor it increasingly seems that one of the most significant issues with families today is that we have so little time for one another, whether it be our spouse, or our children, there increasingly seems to be little time to enjoy each other. While we are busy attending to providing for our security we wind up missing out on that which we are providing for. It seems ironic that the source of our unrest and inability to find peace is that very thing that causes our unrest. This is because we seem unable to understand or embrace with certainty what our Lord is saying to us in today’s Gospel: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” This peace begins with each one of us.
Archbishop Sheen noted in his book Peace of Soul
that “anxiety cannot be cured by a surrender to passions and instincts; the basic cause of our anxiety is a restlessness within time, which comes because we are made for eternity. If there were anywhere on earth a resting place other than God, we may be very sure that the human soul in its long history would have found it before this.” It can be quite difficult to find that peace we are striving for, especially in a world which tells us that we need all those things the world tells us we need. It is so easy for us to get caught up in the material world as if that is all there is. We can find ourselves looking for security or peace in those things we possess as opposed to looking to God for the security we find in those things. As we celebrate today the feast of the Apparition of Michael the Archangel let us pray to him that we may find protection from those things which provoke our restlessness and our preoccupation with things of this world; may Michael the Archangel protect us from the snares of this world. Let us take some time today to truly enjoy those things that really matter. Make a great day!
Servant of God Fulton J. Sheen once suggested that “unless souls are saved, nothing is saved.” He suggested that unless we are attending to matters of eternal security, then temporal things will offer no real security or peace for us. It seems that we increasingly have these things wrong side out. We seem to be so anxious and occupied with providing for our temporal security, to the point of often times missing those things for which we are attempting to secure. What is it they say “One hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, how big my house was, or what kind of car I drove. But the world may be a little better, because I was important in the life of a child.”
As a counselor it increasingly seems that one of the most significant issues with families today is that we have so little time for one another, whether it be our spouse, or our children, there increasingly seems to be little time to enjoy each other. While we are busy attending to providing for our security we wind up missing out on that which we are providing for. It seems ironic that the source of our unrest and inability to find peace is that very thing that causes our unrest. This is because we seem unable to understand or embrace with certainty what our Lord is saying to us in today’s Gospel: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” This peace begins with each one of us.
Archbishop Sheen noted in his book Peace of Soul
that “anxiety cannot be cured by a surrender to passions and instincts; the basic cause of our anxiety is a restlessness within time, which comes because we are made for eternity. If there were anywhere on earth a resting place other than God, we may be very sure that the human soul in its long history would have found it before this.” It can be quite difficult to find that peace we are striving for, especially in a world which tells us that we need all those things the world tells us we need. It is so easy for us to get caught up in the material world as if that is all there is. We can find ourselves looking for security or peace in those things we possess as opposed to looking to God for the security we find in those things. As we celebrate today the feast of the Apparition of Michael the Archangel let us pray to him that we may find protection from those things which provoke our restlessness and our preoccupation with things of this world; may Michael the Archangel protect us from the snares of this world. Let us take some time today to truly enjoy those things that really matter. Make a great day!
Today we celebrate the Apparition of Michael the Archangel.
St. Michael the
Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment