Mass Readings

September 8, 2024

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

One of the most touching YouTube videos I’ve ever seen is one in which a deaf woman receives new technology to heal her hearing. She hears her husband's voice for the first time — and her own, too — and bursts into tears of overwhelming joy. It must have been like an immovable wall between her and her loved ones came tumbling down.

We are all like this woman, to some degree. We believe in the presence of God’s love, but we can’t hear Him. We can’t speak well about Him. The deaf man who can’t speak properly in the Gospel today is an image of what God wants us to experience again and again. Jesus takes the man aside to a private place away from the crowd, touches his ears and tongue, and says, “Ephphata!” The man’s ears are opened, and he speaks clearly. Contact with Christ has this effect on us.

This experience happens to us in our baptism, almost exactly. It happens to us in the liturgy. It happens in our private prayer. It happens when we hear the voice of God in our conscience. The more we engage these privileged channels of Jesus’ healing, the more we are empowered to hear and speak of the presence of God’s perfect love.

— Father John Mui

Mass Readings

September 15, 2024

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This morning I received a text message that a member of my extended family will likely die of cancer within the next few hours. His name is Luke. He is a 45-year-old husband and father of six. Though I am not as close to him as my sister (she is his sister-in-law and knows him well), I wonder: how can we, including Luke himself, manage such a terribly awful and unfair situation?

The words of this Sunday’s Gospel offer a powerful and challenging path. Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). Today I see with new freshness the starkness and strangeness of the words take up. The cross stands for suffering which is unjust, absurd, seemingly hopeless, and humiliating. Jesus doesn’t say “accept” or “endure” or “tolerate,” but “take up.” Embrace it, actively. Choose it and lift it up for others to see what terrifies and sickens us. But somehow, for Jesus, this is the path to “saving one's life.” A new world is breaking in, one in which love is everything, when no relationship can be wounded or die. I trust that in the embraced suffering of Luke and his loved ones, Jesus is taking up his cross and saving us all.

By the time you read this, barring a miracle, Luke will have died. He will be carrying his cross no longer. But we all still face suffering. This week let’s not just endure, but take up our crosses, big and small. That’s our only hope for saving our lives.

— Father John Mui

Mass Readings

September 22, 2024

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

When I was a wet-behind-the-ears seminarian, I was sent for an immersion with the poor. For one month, I lived in a home for adults with developmental disabilities. It was a challenge for me because the residents had significant communication issues. A 30-year-old man there named Robin was totally deaf and mute. He had Down’s Syndrome. He looked like a Viking, with a shock of red hair and a fine beard. But I felt awkward and disconnected from him. All my normal ways of interacting failed. I resigned myself to the fact that we’d never connect.

Then one morning something amazing happened. He was on the living room floor quietly playing with toys. Watching him from a chair, I sensed Jesus’ words float into my mind, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9:37). I thought, “Jesus, you must somehow be in Robin.” I sheepishly made sure no one else was in the room, and then I spoke in a clear voice: “Jesus, are you there?” Robin did not turn to me and say, “Hi, John. Yes, it’s me, Jesus.” He kept playing with his toys in silence.

But something changed in me. From that moment on, it was easier to just be with Robin, to joke around with him, to try sign-language with him, to let him be himself, and for me to be myself. His “disabilities'' were no longer obstacles to overcome. He became just Robin, my friend.

Who in your life seems awkwardly distant or uncomfortable to be with? Next time you see him or her, quietly invoke the name of Jesus, and see how the barriers disappear in you.

— Father John Muir

©LPi