Jun 17: Glory in Weakness

Masaccio: St. Paul (from the Pisa Polyptych)
Museo Nazionale, Pisa, 1426

Friday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Reading I: 2 Cor 11:18, 21-30

“If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness (NRSV, 2 Cor 11:30).”

Father, it seems strange that, with St. Paul, I thank you, not only for the wonderful realities that fill my life, but also for the weakness, the suffering and the emptiness. Everything I am and everything I do comes, not from myself, but from you. How easy for me to boast of the successes in my life, forgetting that it is only through you, Father, that they have been possible. That is why the moments of weakness are so important because they bring home to me my nothingness without you.

Father, may I rejoice in every moment, in failure as well as success, because, in every moment, I have the possibility, through your Word, of accepting you more fully into myself and of growing in your life. May every moment then, of apparent success or of apparent failure, be for me a moment of glory.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.