Carry the gospel with you

Today’s gospel reading:

Luke 17:7-10

Jesus said to the Apostles: “Who among you would say to your servant who has just come in from plowing  or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here immediately and take your place at table’?  Would he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare something for me to eat.  Put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink. You may eat and drink when I am finished’?  Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded?  So should it be with you.  When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’”

Reflection on the gospel reading:  Jesus reminds us in today’s gospel to remain right-sized.  He counsels us not to become puffed-up with self-satisfaction when we do our duty but always be prepared to do more than life requires us to do.

Saint of the day:  Menas Kallikelados may have been a camel driver in civilian life. A soldier in the imperial Roman army, he served under Firmilian during the anti-Christian persecutions of Diocletian and Maximian.  Menas left the army for his own safety, and so he would not in any way support such a regime. He retired for a while as a mountain hermit. During a great pagan festival, Menas came down from the mountains to preach Christianity in Cotyaes, Phrygia. He was tried for his faith before the Roman prefect Pyrrhus, scourged, tortured and martyred.  He was beheaded around 300 at Cotyaes, Phrygia and buried at Mareotis, Egypt.  His grave in Egypt became known as a place of miracles, and a basilica built over his grave became one of the great sanctuaries of Christendom; it was called the glory of the Libyan desert. Merchants traveling through the area spread stories about him, and churches built in his honor at Cotyaeus and Constantinople gave rise to local legends about him. The basilica was destroyed and his tomb lost in the seventh century, and was rediscovered in an archeological expedition in 1905.

Spiritual reading of the day:  It does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration. It is bad form to say such things, to recognize such possibilities. But they are possibilities, and they are not often intelligently taken into account. People get emotional about them from time to time, and then try to sweep them aside into forgetfulness. The fact remains that we have created for ourselves a culture which is not yet livable for mankind as a whole. (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton)