Category Archives: Sirach

Look into the depths

1 Reply
Mount of the Beatitudes

For the Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God. 1 Corinithians 2:10b

God’s Holy Spirit leads me to scrutinize my words, actions, behaviors, and attitudes to discern where I have loved and where I have neglected to love.

Today I will spend quiet time alone and ask the Spirit to open my mind and heart to receive God’s love, to help me choose justice, generosity, forgiveness, and compassion in my interactions—and to be accountable for how I treat myself and others.

Lord, help me trust and practice your law of love today.

Listen

Leave a reply
JESUS MAFA. The poor invited to the feast, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48397 [retrieved August 28, 2022].

An attentive ear is the joy of the wise.
Sirach 3:29b

Lord, today I will listen for your voice in sacred Scripture, in my heart, and in the suffering of the world. Help me to quiet my worries. Show me how to respond to the needs of the poor.

A store of love and goodness

Leave a reply

“A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good.” Luke6:45a

We have a blessed beginning: we are each made in the image of God’s love and goodness.

May I be willing to be healed of everything that distorts my store of love and goodness: fear, resentment, greed, jealousy, arrogance.

May I uncover the love, forgiveness, generosity, acceptance, and humility that are my birthright and let them flow from me into our fragile world.

My choice

Leave a reply

Persian Jesus (Isa) miniature of
Sermon on the Mount

If you choose you can keep the commandments,
they will save you;
if you trust in God, you too shall live;
he has set before you fire and water
to whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand.
Before man are life and death, good and evil,
whichever he chooses shall be given him.
Sirach 15:15-17

Today I will choose the qualities of God: patience, kindness, civility, respect, compassion, delight, and love.

I will choose self-responsibility and forgiveness.

I will choose to act with integrity and mercy.

I will choose quiet time with God.

 

 

We are God’s Holy Family

4 Replies

256px-Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_052

The Flight into Egypt
Attributed to Rembrandt, via Wikimedia Commons

Take care of your father when he is old;
grieve him not as long as he lives.
Even if his mind fail, be considerate of him;
revile him not all the days of his life;
kindness to a father will not be forgotten,
firmly planted against the debt of your sins
—a house raised in justice to you. Sirach 3:12-14

He is so fragile, my father, and every day getting physically smaller as his Spirit outgrows his frail body.

He doesn’t know us any more, but his smile is as sweet as ever and lights up his eyes. “I love you,” he says over and over. He hasn’t lost the inner wisdom that still knows how to “put on love, the bond of perfection.”