Nov 14: Our Strength Comes from the Lord

Paolo Uccello: St. Stephen Defending his Faith in Jesus Christ

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Gospel: Lk 21:5-19

“This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict (NRSV, Lk 21:13-15).”

Father in heaven, I first accepted the gift of your Holy Spirit while still in my mother’s womb. When? No one can be sure. Certainly by the time that I was capable of surviving on my own outside the womb. Perhaps when the brain was physically developed enough to support consciousness. Still only on the verge of personhood, and in the absence of language and logic, it was in your same power as giver of the gift that the “yes” was spoken from my mother’s womb, the “yes” that transformed what had been merely physical human life into the life of a new human being sharing already in your divine life. Spoken in the power of your Holy Spirit, yet it became my own personal “yes,” the first of my life. Since that moment, you, Lord, have been calling me forward to you, challenging me in your Spirit to say “yes” over and over again that I might grow constantly in the divinity that you share with all human beings and make manifest in all of creation.

To be a human being is always to live in your saving presence. It is grace, more than reason, that defines humanity. I am human, Father, because you constantly offer me your life even when I reject the gift. In sin I may reject that divine presence but I cannot remove myself from it. That is the horror of sin: to reject what I am fundamentally at the heart of my being.

Lord, when, in my mother’s womb, I received from you the gift of being a human person sharing in your divine life, I, likewise in the power of the Holy Spirit, deep within me, in the very gift of divine life, heard you speak a word to me. Just as you offer your divine life to every human in every time and every place, so in that gift you speak to all the same one word, revealing yourself once and for all and calling everyone to you as to one's only true future.

This is the same one word that you spoke to our first parents, to Abraham and Moses, to all of the prophets, and indeed to every person. We all hear this word differently because of who we are and where we are on the journey towards you who are our future. In Jesus Christ that word is fully heard and shared with us.

Because we are not only spiritual beings but also material beings living out our earthly lives in history, so much of what we learn is communicated through the senses. The world which we share with others is largely a world that we can see and touch and manipulate. But, Lord God, the true fount of knowledge is not outside of us, a knowledge that has to be acquired through the senses. No, true wisdom is found within by listening to your one word spoken constantly to us from that first moment in our mother’s womb, the same one word that you speak to all of your daughters and sons, to every human being.

At all times I can arrive at a greater understanding of self which is finally determined by my relationship with you, Lord, not first of all by experience in the world, nor by reason alone, but principally by a careful inward listening to the one word that you, Father, speak to me and to all.

This is the word, hopefully ever more fully grasped and understood, that will give me the strength that I need in all of life’s situations, especially the most difficult, when your enemies press in upon me. Then your truth, more clearly comprehended than ever before, will confound your enemies and bring me closer to you who are the source and destiny of everything that I am.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.