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World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
Holy lives of inspiration | Why pray?
In the last couple of months in the US, the country has been struggling with how to manage its immigration. There has been an effort to regulate the people coming in, and to deport those with no papers to some other places. However, it has come to the awareness of a section of policymakers that the country relies heavily on labor whose immigration status is irregular. The hospitality industry, the construction industry, and the agricultural sector are such areas that are labor-intensive and require many hands-on people. Think of the vineyards in Napa Valley and Sonoma in California with hectares and hectares of ripe grapes and strawberries with no one to pick them. Imagine everything just rotting and going to waste and the economic losses to the farmers who invested so much in these expensive vineyards and wineries. Fruit Ripe for Harvesting In our gospel today, Jesus uses an agricultural or farming image to speak to us about matters that are spiritual. He says, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.” Think of thousands and thousands of people with no one to reach out to them with the gospel, with no one to spiritually tend to them.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Why pray?
One of the bonuses of the holiday, in this case Independence Day, falling on a Friday, was the long weekend. This allowed people to connect and reconnect with family and friends and even meet some new folks along the way. Today's Mass readings represent two experiences of encountering God that most of us will experience in our lives, sometimes multiple times. In the first, there is Jacob, who receives an important message in a dream that will strengthen his faith and guide him forward. And, in the Gospel, there is the official whose daughter is critically ill and the woman who has long suffered hemorrhages, who both place their full trust in the healing power of Jesus.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
Sometimes we tend to think of saints as extraordinary human beings and larger-than-life figures who had it all together. Today we celebrate a man who struggled in his faith to the extent that his second name became “The Doubter.” He was a man who, doubted the resurrection of Jesus. As we say within Holy Cross circles, he thought Jesus was “dead, dead, dead!” He demanded proof for him to believe the resurrection: “Unless I see the mark of nails in his hands, unless I put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Well, the Lord appeared to the disciples and said to Thomas, "Come here, put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe."
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
There is a curious art form in Japanese pottery called Kintsugi, maybe you have heard of it. When a pottery breaks, instead of throwing it away, the artisan repairs it with a gold polish. The cracks aren’t hidden. They’re illuminated. What was once broken and useless is now more beautiful, more valuable, precisely because of its fractures and brokenness. In today’s Gospel, Zechariah is a man silenced. For nine months, no words. Heaven has hit the mute button on him. Now remember, he’s a priest. Words are his tool, his identity. He blesses, he prays aloud, he chants in the temple. And yet, for 9 months Zechariah is a man of gestures and scribbled tablets. Heaven, it seems, doesn’t trust his voice, yet.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
Recently, I was talking with several priests, and the question of whether they could stay in their current parish or have to begin at a new parish came up. Two of the priests are in their mid-to-late sixties, and they reasoned that beginning anew would not be easy or perhaps good for the parishes involved. Only God knows how their or any of our stories will emerge. However, this conversation added context to our first reading where the Lord sends Abram to a new land, leaving the land of his people and the family home, and needing to convince his wife, his brother’s son, all the people in their household, and pack up their possessions too. Whether you are a priest, married, or single, preparing and moving to a new place, in this case to one that Abram has never seen, is never easy, and to compound things—Abram is seventy-five years old!
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
Saint Anthony of Padua {1195-1231} was a Franciscan priest and the best known follower of Saint Francis of Assisi and who was famous for his preaching, miracles and holy life, However, he is popularly known for his intercession when an item has been lost. He is often invoked with the familiar phrase: “Tony, Tony, come around, something’s lost and can’t be found.”
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