Carry the gospel with you

Gospel reading of the day:

Matthew 7:7-12

Jesus said to his disciples: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which one of you would hand his son a stone when he asked for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asked for a fish? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.

“Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets.”

Reflection on the gospel reading: Jesus in this passage talks about the efficacy of prayer. Jesus makes an extraordinary promise that when we petition God, God will not deny us. But God is not a vending machine, and as I observed a couple of days ago, prayer is not a wish factory. What Jesus promises in this passage is that when we enter a relationship with God through constant and faithful prayer, our minds and hearts will conform to the Father’s. As James observes in his letter, “Draw close to God, and God will draw close to you.” Indeed, as we persevere in our prayer, we put on the mind of Christ, and the more our minds align with Jesus’, the less the content of our prayer will contradict the life of God. I cannot imagine Christian life without prayer: asking, seeking, and knocking are not one shot deals; they are a process of regular conversation with God that fosters God’s presence in our hearts. The promise of prayer is that in it, God will give God’s self as gift.

Saint of the day: David is the patron saint of Wales and perhaps the most famous of British saints. Ironically, we have little reliable information about him.

It is known that he became a priest, engaged in missionary work and founded many monasteries, including his principal abbey in southwestern Wales. Many stories and legends sprang up about David and his Welsh monks. Their austerity was extreme. They worked in silence without the help of animals to till the soil. Their food was limited to bread, vegetables and water.

In about the year 550, David attended a synod where his eloquence impressed his fellow monks to such a degree that he was elected primate of the region. The episcopal see was moved to Mynyw, where he had his monastery (now called St. David’s). He ruled his diocese until he had reached a very old age. His last words to his monks and subjects were: “Be joyful, brothers and sisters. Keep your faith, and do the little things that you have seen and heard with me.”

St. David is pictured standing on a mound with a dove on his shoulder. The legend is that once while he was preaching a dove descended to his shoulder and the earth rose to lift him high above the people so that he could be heard. Over 50 churches in South Wales were dedicated to him in pre-Reformation days.

Spiritual reading: In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.)