A MESSAGE FOR THE 15th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
It's harvest
time again, and like every year the farmers are busy in the fields, gathering the
crops for market. Imagine the surprise
of these farmers, if they were to go to the fields and find soybeans growing
where they had planted corn, or cherries growing on their apple trees! But of course we all know that such a
situation would be impossible. Why? Because, what we sow, that shall we reap.
When the grim
reaper comes to harvest our souls, God will not find grace and goodness if we
have sown sin and self-gratification.
What he finds when he examines our souls for judgment should not, and
will not, surprise us when the time comes.
We shall be all too familiar with the fruit we have sown, and our
eternal fate will be known to us even before the good Lord pronounces the words
of judgment over us.
We have a
limited time here on earth to plant the fruits of the Holy Ghost in our souls—charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness,
longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, and chastity. Each of us knows very well today how faithful
we have been in planting these fruits, and to what extent we are guilty of
planting other fruits instead, fruits opposed to these beautiful products of
grace within us. We know only too well,
if we choose to think about it, the state of our souls this morning and our
attachment to the same sins and vices we practice all week long.
This week's Ember
Days give us an opportunity to do some reparation for our sins with a little
penance. Let's use these days of fast
not just to say sorry to God, but to wake us from the sleep of complacence we
live in. As our Lord "woke"
the widow's son from the dead in today's Gospel, let us ask him to wake us from
our willful indifference to our lifestyles insofar as they do not bear the
fruits of the Holy Ghost. We all know exactly what we have to do.
Let's sow a
little penance and good resolution in our life this week. Let's ask ourselves what the harvest of our
souls would produce if we were to die today, and resolve instead that when we
finally awake from death and find ourselves before the judgment seat of God, he
may find in us only good fruits ripe for eternal happiness.
No comments:
Post a Comment