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World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
Learn more about our faith | Strengthening family unity
“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” ~Mark Twain In Matthew's Gospel, we are presented with Jesus extending his kindness to the broken and the vulnerable, restoring them to good health from all their ailments. They brought him lame, dumb, and all with other sicknesses. And because of his compassionate heart and acting with authority from his Father, he did not hesitate to work healing miracles among them. People filled with gratitude praised God for all that they were experiencing through Jesus Christ’s ministry. No one who met Jesus remained the same, they were all touched and transformed by his healing and miraculous power, more so his compassionate love. His miracles demonstrated the power of God and the magnitude of his mercy and kindness toward us humans. That is probably why the crowd never wanted to dispatch; they stayed put for three days listening to Jesus.
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Learn more about our faith | Strengthening family unity | Why pray?
“Blessed are the eyes that see what you see” This is a beautiful phrase that Jesus uses to encourage his disciples and those who were listening to him that they carry a special favor in their hands. They have been blessed because they are witnessing what important figures in the past longed for but never got to. Jesus, in announcing this blessing, also highlights the special and unique relationship He shares with the Father: He states that “all things have been delivered to me by my Father” His mission is to reveal that Father to us. To make Him accessible and intelligible to us as humans.
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Learn more about our faith | Strengthening family unity | Why pray?
Good morning, beloved friends, and a blessed welcome to this first week of Advent! The Church invites us to prepare our hearts for Christ's coming—both celebrating His birth at Christmas and anticipating His return in glory.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
Last week the Church offered us the Books of the Maccabees for reflection. This week we are offered the book of Daniel that we rarely reflect on too. In the year 587 B.C the Babylonians took almost all the Jewish people from their homeland to captivity in Babylon. Under different Babylonian kings such as Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, the Jewish people suffered great abuse and persecution in exile but never abandoned their belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Today in Our First Reading we hear the Babylonian King Belshazzar threw an extravagant party for hundreds of his noble men, officers and their wives. There was plenty of wine, food and entertainment, as the crowd “praised their gods made of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood and stone.” The scene painted is of power, self-indulgence, and carousing.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
If you’ve ever looked at old pictures or home movies you notice how much has changed, say from the 70’s or 80’s and if you’re a movie buff, you’ll notice that the one constant through the decades is also change. It’s nostalgic for us to look back at the old cars, radios, tv’s, phones, and stereos…and we also recognize how people and organizations have changed too, including religious and political leaders, and even our parishes or physical churches that we’ve gone to each Sunday…. Change is part of life on earth and in both readings from Daniel and Luke, we receive a clear message which should cause us to wonder, how do we prepare for the change that the Word of God speaks to us about today?
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
Thomas Marton once said” “Love seeks one thing only, the good of the one loved.” What he is saying here is that true selfless love is caring, giving and putting the other person’s happiness before one’s own, without expecting anything in return.” In today’s Gospel, we have Jesus who had been observing those who were bringing their tithes into the temple basket. The rich people showed up with pride to donate from their surplus, but Jesus notices this poor widow dropping in the only coins she had left in her life. Under normal circumstances many of us would have only noticed rich people or those we consider to be important; most likely we would have missed out on recognizing the poor widow. The widow, according to Jesus, did not only donate coins, but she did it with a selfless heart. She didn’t calculate what she will be left with but gave all.
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