Getting Ready to Pray                     

We hear a “feel-good” story in today’s First Reading. Elisha is a wandering prophet and receives hospitality from an elderly couple each time his journey takes him near their home. They welcome him and even add a rooftop bedroom for him to stay in, each time he visits.

Elisha offers them a wonderful pregnant promise in return for their hosting him. As they have welcomed him as a holy gift, they will be fondling a child within a year. It did happen and the rest of the story which follows these verses is worth reading. Trusting God’s work is a quality of holiness.

Matthew is presenting Jesus in his teaching clothes (Gospel). He is instructing those he will be sending to proclaim the Good News. The words sound harsh and can lead us to examine how we are doing on his team. Well we love our parents We love family and friends deeply and feel affection for them more than we feel for Jesus. (Not doing too well on the "holiness scale.")

Some Thoughts 

We are told to pick up our crosses every day, hmm, that means all the time, hmm We are encouraged to lose our lives and not try to find them (still not doing too well).

Then we hear about welcoming the Elisa-types and giving them kind care (doing a little better on that one).

Stop that!!!! No rating, comparing, giving ourselves a number or degree of holiness!

There are all kinds of personalities and some of them just seem to be more conformable to trusting, being generous and welcoming, accepting crosses, and trusting in promises. It would not be a loving God, sending us Jesus and then telling us that holiness depends on your personality profile, your number, your animal, or under what zodiac sign you were born.

The first twelve seemed to represent most of the popular varieties of personality types. The men with whom I entered the Jesuits and certainly the ones with whom I live here in our small community in north Omaha, form new categories still undefined in all psychology books.

I smile now, remembering how sometimes after celebrating a liturgy or giving a retreat, a person might say something about my being so holy. Funny I never have heard me referred to as holy within any Jesuit circles. So I wonder who’s right!

Elisha was known as a holy man, but those two who welcomed him year after year manifested some kind of holiness in being generous and trusting in the promise. Holiness has many sides and many faces.

There is a holiness of doing and a holiness of receiving. There is a holiness in accepting the who of each of us. There is a holiness in dealing out what has been put in each of us by God.

God is infinitely holy and we are each a refraction of that holiness. Do we do something holy so we can feel holy? Holiness is so much more than a feeling. We do something to be nothing more than what we are a glimpse of the holiness of God. (Bob, Jim, Robert, Mike, and even myself form our community of holiness, but believe me, it is a matter of pure believing, and that is the real and essential truth.)

O, bless the Lord, my soul,
and let all that is within me bless his holy name.
Psalm 103:1