Since my youth, I have had a tendency to be verbose, loquacious, and garrulous in my speech and my writing, a propensity exacerbated by my purchase of a Roget’s Thesaurus when I was in high school. I would undertake each essay with delight, poring through Roget’s in search of juicy adjectives, which I would then scatter lavishly throughout my writing like ticker tape on a parade. My poor English literature teacher! He taught me two years in a row, time spent primarily in shaping me into a more restrained writer. This is the type of advice he would give me:


“Brevity is the soul of wit.” (William Shakespeare)
“If you can say it in a paragraph, don’t write a book.” (Frank Sonnenberg)
“Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.” (Louise Brooks)


We may live in the time of the sound bite and the 280-character Tweet, but humanity’s appreciation of concision in communication has been around for hundreds — nay thousands — of years. Take Jesus as an example. As Sunday’s Gospel shows us, here is a man who knows how to get to the point. Unlike other exorcists of His time, Jesus does not rely on lengthy incantations to dispel the unclean spirit from the man possessed. Instead, He commands, “Be silent, and come out of him!” (And, let it be said, not once did He feel the need to consult Roget’s.)


Jesus’ example invites me to reflect on an important question: When it comes to prayer, am I confident that God will listen to a simple, unadorned request, or do I feel I need to reiterate my request in manifold ways in the hope that one of those ways will persuade Him?


I have a friend who, for a number of years, had been suffering from a skin infection. The normal course of treatment had been painful and unsuccessful, and he despaired of ever being cured. One day, his wife offered to pray for him, and although he did not have great faith, he accepted her offer. She said, “Lord, I ask you to heal this skin infection, and may it never return.” That was it. The next day my friend woke to find his infection resolved, and it has never returned.


In this Gospel, Jesus speaks to the unclean spirit with authority, yes, because He is God. But He speaks also with confidence because he believes that what He says will happen. There is a lesson for me here. Do I lay my prayers before God, believing that He wants to and will answer them? I should believe it, because Jesus told me I should. In Matthew 7:7-8, He says: “Ask and it will be given to you… For everyone who asks receives …”


Lord, it takes courage to believe. Give me confidence that You hear my prayers, that You will answer those that are for my good, and that in not answering some of my prayers, You have something so much better in store for me. Amen.




Donna Davis

Saint Paul, as he was writing to the Corinthians, wanted to “promote good order”. How easy is it to fall out of order? For me? Quite easy, actually. Disorderliness seems to be my nature. It's not how I want to be, but it's how I often am. God, however, is very orderly.


If you have spent any time in Genesis 1 and 2 (If you haven’t, I highly recommend it), you will have a sense of just how orderly God is. Like a skilled project manager, He initiates a plan of action to lovingly mould out of a “formless void” (Genesis 1:2), life, in all its diversity, beauty, and purposefulness. He moves with intention and precision to place within His creation a harmonious balance of water, earth, sky, day, night, plants, animals — all of His magnificent creativity finally culminating in His magnum opus: humankind. You and me.


“So God created humankind in his image,
In the image of God he created them;
Male and female he created them.”
(Genesis 1:27)


God is perfection. A perfect being who created us after His own image. The image of orderliness, let’s say.


So, there is good reason for our own innate desire for order. We have laws to institute order, we clean our houses to maintain order, school teachers line children up for transitions in an orderly fashion. Take some time to think about the number of routines in your day that point to our need for order. Still, life can feel very chaotic at times. Sometimes this is because of our external circumstances, but I would assert that the chaos that lives within us is the most unsettling.


It certainly causes an uneasiness in me, and still I get the proper order of things wrong regularly. Just the other day, I was visiting an elementary school, and a wee 5-year-old leaned up next to me and asked, “Where’d you come from?” I replied, “Well, I drove here in my car.” And she said, “No, I mean, who MADE you?” “Oh! My mommy and daddy did,” I said. “Oh,” she mused, almost disapprovingly, and then added matter-of-factly, “God made me.”


This child is well ordered. Close in age to her own genesis, she carries no confusion around Who comes first and was totally at peace expressing what she knows to be true. It seems the farther I move away from my own genesis, the more disordered I am prone to become.


The antidote, perhaps, to my interior chaos, could be to meditate on this coming-from-ness which I have been gifted by my Father — meditating on Order Himself. This initial step may actually help me to draw away from that which has fallen out of order in my life, by drawing me into the One who brings order to all things. In order to initiate this focussed time with God, I will be asking myself the same question that beautiful little girl so insightfully asked me: "Who made you?"




Lori MacDonald

Listen to me!?!


How many times have you said that to someone?


How many times have you said that to God? 


Me? Countless times! And I’m willing to bet you have too. When I find myself saying this to God, I’m really and truly the one who needs to listen. Because clearly I’m not hearing God. Or I may be hearing Him but I just don’t like what I’m hearing. And so, like a 4 year old, I stick my fingers in my ears, and stop listening. Funny enough though, in most group settings when given the option, I default to listening rather than talking. It drives some people crazy — colleagues, former bosses (Possibly current bosses!), friends, family, new people I meet. My lack of talking can come across as being aloof or indifferent, or even that I’m not really listening at all. But I am.


What I’m listening to right now, like many people, is The Bible in a Year  podcast with Fr. Mike Schmitz. I have always had a love of words and The Word. Hearing the whole Bible proclaimed and broken open for me for a few minutes everyday? Count me in! Fr. Mike has great experience and wisdom to share. I was blessed to meet him a few years ago and he’s exactly the same in person. Easy to talk to. Easy to listen to. And thus, it’s easy to open my heart to whatever the Lord has to say to me through Fr. Mike’s ministry.


But not every person I meet is easy to listen to. People call my office to complain about something their pastor or the bishop has said or done. Others corner me at a gathering or meeting and recite a laundry list of everything wrong with our Church that I have to fix. Those folks — they’re not that easy to listen to. Enough of those conversations, and my heart can close off and harden pretty quickly — but that’s not fair of me. God’s voice is just as much in the disgruntled person’s voice as it is in Fr. Mike’s voice. God speaks through each of us and is present to us in the voices of all His creations. In return, like the psalmist writes, we are invited to raise our voices in praise, thanksgiving, and worship of the One who gives us voice. I need to not only listen to hear, but I need to listen to learn. To learn about how God is working in the other person’s life. When I listen to learn rather than just listen to hear — I can learn about myself as much as I learn about the one who is speaking to me.  In hearing about God’s movement in the life of another, I can better recognize God’s movement in mine.  


God is listening to me. And He simply asks me to do the same. 


O that today you would listen to the voice of the Lord. Do not harden your heart.




Aurea Sadi

My favourite line in this passage is when God says to Moses, “They are right in what they have said.” Imagine, the God of all creation saying that the people are right? This feels to me like an apology from God, “Sorry folks, I thought you’d get that, but I was wrong. Let’s try this a different way.” What kind of a god treats his creatures with this kind of respect? 

I also get a sense of compassion in this passage. God knows the fear that the Israelites are experiencing when they say, “Let me not hear the voice of the Lord my God anymore or ever again see this great fire, lest I die.” His response is not to chastise them but to act with compassion and spare them from this anxiety. Psalm 95 says, “Oh that today you would listen to the voice of the Lord. Do not harden your hearts.” I see the reflection of God’s heart in this beautiful psalm. He heard the voice of HIs people and He didn’t harden His heart to them. He showed them compassion and respect. 

This poses a dilemma for me. When someone treats me with compassion and respect it makes me take a look at why they would act this way towards me. What have I done to deserve that person's respect, and how do I live up to this in future dealings with them? What if I’m not the person that they think I am? What if I do something to lose their respect? Will I also then lose their love? 

This is what God is speaking to me through His word. He respects us, He has compassion for us, He loves us. He will do whatever it takes to make us understand this, even sending His only begotten Son to die and save us so we can live with Him forever. He doesn’t expect us to be perfect or to constantly perform in a way that deserves His respect. What He does ask of us is to be open to hearing His voice and receiving His love. As hard as this is for us to accept sometimes, it is the Truth. 

The God of the universe wants to have a relationship with us and His word proves it. 




​Maxine Brown
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