Always keep God’s peace and love among you, and when you have to seek guidance about your affairs, take great care to be of one mind. Live in mutual good-will also with Christ’s other servants,
We know little of Joseph. There were dramatic moments in his life, of course: Bethlehem, the flight into Egypt, the temple episode, but my feeling at least is that for the essential Joseph, the body and substance of his life was in the ordinary, simple, working, family life in Nazareth. The child and his mother depended on him for food, a home, love, basic education, a place in the social fabric of their village.
After [the Lord’s Prayer] the Priest says, “Holy things to holy men.” Holy are the gifts presented, having received the visitation of the Holy Ghost; holy are ye also, having been deemed worthy of the Holy Ghost; the holy things therefore correspond to the holy persons.
There is no other God,
there never was and there never will be,
than God the Father,
unbegotten and without beginning,
For the faithful . . . Lent has a two-fold character. On the one hand, it is reparatory and restorative: the time when “all past slothfulnesses are chastised, all negligences atoned for” (Leo the Great, Sermon 39). Ideally, Leo maintains, “we should remain in God’s sight always the same, as we ought to be found on the Easter feast itself.”
At first glance Jesus’ shocking actions in the temple hardly seem loving. Yet they reveal his inexhaustible passion for his Father, a passion and zeal that drives all his actions. The Father yearns to be with his children; he seeks our company and desires that we approach him in right ways.
In these days then of the holy fast, let us pursue even more fruitfully the works of compassion which must always be the aim of our zeal. “We must do good to all, and especially to those of the household of the faith,” so that in the very distribution of alms also, we may imitate the goodness of the heavenly Father “who causes his sun to rise on good people as well as evil, and his rain to fall of the just and unjust alike.”
Saint Paul tells us that “that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” (1 Cor. xv., 66.) I have however reversed the order of things set forth by the apostle, and spoken of those facts first which show the spiritual claims that Haiti has upon American Christians. I come lastly to speak of the natural claims of that people upon the grateful remembrance of all patriotic American citizens.
Gregory the Great, writing over five hundred years after Paul, composed one of the first manuals on pastoral care and Christian leadership. This work, sent by Gregory to Leander of Seville, was highly praised and enjoyed a wide readership, including Alfred the Great and Charlemagne.
There are many voices competing for our attention in the world today—our families, our coworkers, the homeless and hungry, our politicians. We hear voices hounding us to buy more goods and services, voices instilling fear, hopeful voices, cynical voices, vengeful voices, our own voice of self-preservation.