There is a Catholic monthly called Magnificat. It is beautiful. It is indispensable. Magnificat has the Scripture readings for Mass each day, meditations and prayers for morning, evening, and night, among other things (saint profiles, etc.).
Tomorrow is 25 years since the September 11 attacks on the United States. So many of us have our memories — including, many of us, of someone who died that day. Our Dan McLaughlin worked at the World Trade Center. Barbara Olson, a friend of many here, especially at the time, was murdered that day.
On the morning of September 12, 2001, subscribers opened their issues longing for some sign of life and hope from God. Did He even exist? Was he sleeping? Could someone please say something that at least tries to make sense of what’s happening?
This is what they read:
How easy it is, in times of ease, for us to become dependent on our routines, on the established order of our day-to-day existence, to carry us along. We begin to take things for granted, to rely on ourselves and on our own resources, to “settle in” in this world and look to it for our support. We all too easily come to equate being comfortable with a sense of well-being, to seek our comfort solely in the sense of being comfortable. Friends and possessions surround us, one day is followed by the next, good health and happiness for the most part are ours. We don’t have to desire much of the things of this world — to be enamored of riches, for example, or greedy or avaricious — in order to have gained this sense of comfort and well-being, to trust in them as our support — and to take God for granted. It is the status quo that we rely on, that carries us from day to day, and somehow we begin to lose sight of the fact that under all these things and behind all these things it is God who supports and sustains us. We go along, taking for granted that tomorrow will be very much like today, comfortable in the world we have created for ourselves, secure in the established order we have learned to live with, however imperfect it may be, and give little thought to God at all.
The meditation that morning was from Father Walter J. Ciszek, S.J., a Jesuit priest who spent 23 years as a Soviet prisoner, accused of being a spy for the Vatican. It was an excerpt from his book, He Leadeth Me.
Fr. Ciszek continues:
Somehow, then, God must contrive to break through those routines of ours and remind us once again, like Israel, that we are ultimately dependent only upon him, that he has made us and destined us for life with him through all eternity, that the things of this world and this world itself are not our lasting city, that his we are and that we must look to him and turn to him in everything. Then it is, perhaps, that he must allow our whole world to be turned upside down in order to remind us it is not our permanent abode or final destiny, to bring us to our senses and restore our sense of values, to turn our thoughts once more to him—even if at first our thoughts are questioning and full of reproaches. Then it is that he must remind us again, with terrible clarity, that he meant exactly what he said in those seemingly simple words of the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not be anxious about what you shall eat, or what you shall wear, or where you shall sleep, but seek first the kingdom of God and his justice.”
Tonight, yet again, Magnificat seems to know something we don’t always. You may find tonight’s especially appropriate/helpful to pray or otherwise reflect on.
Psalm 375-11
Commit your life to the Lord,
trust in him and he will act,
so that your justice breaks forth like the light,
your cause like the noon-day sun.
Be still before the Lord and wait in patience;
do not fret at the man who prospers;
a man who makes evil plots
to bring down the needy and the poor.
Calm your anger and forget your rage;
do not fret, it only leads to evil.
For those who do evil shall perish;
the patient shall inherit the land.
A little longer — and the wicked shall have gone.
Look at his place, he is not there.
But the humble shall own the land
and enjoy the fullness of peace.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Word of God
Ephesians 4:26-27, 31-32
Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun set on your anger, and do not leave room for the devil. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. [And] be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. . . .
Let us pray to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our peace: R/Grant patience, Lord, grant peace.
To the angry and the envious: R/
To the bitter and the persecuted: R/
To the kind who find no kindness from others: R/
To the compassionate who meet no compassion in others: R/
To the forgiving who are not forgiven by others: R/
[Pray for your own personal intentions.]
Our Father, Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy Will be done,
on earth as it is in Heaven.Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.
May the Lord deliver us from all evil and bring us to life everlasting! Amen.