1st Week of OT 2021 - Monday - Beginning of something new

 

When I begin RCIA in the fall, the participants often have had very little exposure to the Gospels—they may have heard some stories about Jesus’ miracles and certainly his death and resurrection on the cross. So one of the first Gospel stories I share with them is todays Gospel, and that’s kind of fitting, for it was peter, james and john’s first encounter with the Lord too.

Here is the call to leave behind the comfortable: our comfortable lives our comfortable habits, perhaps even our livelihoods; everything needs to be set aside that hinders me from following Jesus Christ; everything that keeps me from knowing him and loving him is to be seen as an obstacle—and something to be cast aside like the nets of the fishermen.

It’s no coincidence that we read of this Gospel as we begin, once again, the season of Ordinary Time—the time of the year that we focus on imitating the Lord and putting his teachings into practice in the ordinary circumstances of our lives. Ordering our lives to conform more with his, again, always means setting aside the comfortable—to follow him more closely.

Thomas Aquinas spoke of a sadness that comes from our unwillingness to seek after our greatest good—he called it acedia—a sort of depression that sets in when we aren’t attending to our spiritual lives as we should.

Rather, than acedia, we are to be filled with the excitement Peter, James, Andrew, and John experienced when the Lord said, “Come after me. I will make you fishers of men.” There is an excitement that comes from a willingness to follow the Lord into the unknown, trusting that whatever he has planned is much better than anything than I could come up with. 

This Gospel represents God breaking into our lives to call us to something new, and God is certainly doing that has we enter into this new liturgical season.

It may be a new spiritual devotion, a new way of service, a new way of offering up our sufferings.  But even in these short weeks before the season of Lent begins, the Lord wants to stretch us, change us, transform us, and fill us with the new wine of the spirit.

Ask the Holy Spirit to help you discover how to follow Christ more deeply today, that he may make you fishers of men for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

 

To God the Father Almighty we direct the prayers of our heart for the needs and salvation of humanity and the good of His faithful ones.

For the holy Church of God, that the Lord may graciously watch over her and care for her.

For the peoples of the world, that the Lord may graciously preserve harmony among them.

For all who are oppressed by any kind of need, that the Lord may graciously grant them relief.

For ourselves and our own community, that the Lord may graciously receive us as a sacrifice acceptable to himself.

For our beloved dead, for the poor souls in purgatory, and for X, for whom this Mass is offered.

O God, our refuge and our strength, hear the prayers of your Church, for you yourself are the source of all devotion, and grant, we pray, that what we ask in faith we may truly obtain. Through Christ our Lord.