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Take a Leap (of Faith)

21/3/2025

A Reflection on the Gospel for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:
Third Sunday of Lent

Luke
13.1-9

Jesus was teaching the crowds; some of those present told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

Jesus asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them — do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

Then Jesus told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’

“The gardener replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

The classic parental challenge comes to mind: “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?” We all know this illustrative reminder that we need to think for ourselves, not just follow the crowd. As a young person, while I believe that I understood this exaggerated warning, there are plenty of other scenarios and worldviews into which I found myself led, and I accepted them because they were what “everyone else is doing.” Sadly, I can see now that I missed a lot of the wisdom in the old bridge-jumping question, perhaps because of the pure ridiculousness of that example. The truth is, as a teen and young adult, I was not really interested in going against the grain, and so I didn’t always put a lot of thought into my inclinations or decisions.

When I began attending church, I railed against the idea of repentance because, like most people I knew, I believed myself to possess a relative goodness upon which I rested. Sure, I failed sometimes to be patient, or selfless, or generous, but so did everyone else, and I often saw others fail more than I did! So by comparison, I was doing all right. My conscience was not formed in relation to God, but to the sinners around me. Essentially, everyone else was jumping off bridges, and I ran after them, yelling “wait for me!”, and went into a free fall.

Deep down, I knew there was some serious repentance required, but I tried to avoid it by minimizing my faults and failures and excusing myself because I knew my intentions, and therefore all was well. When I (slowly) came to the realization that God simply loves me and wants me to bear fruit in the name of Love, I took a huge leap of faith and decided to trust what He says throughout Scripture, and notably in this Gospel reading.

I believe that if I were to have died after having jumped off all those proverbial bridges, without reaching the realization that I had a lot to reconcile with God, it would have been a far less peaceful death than the one I will die having understood His role in my life and having made amends for my transgressions… and thankfully, He is so merciful that He will wait for me, and for all of us to do this work. He is a patient, skilled gardener to the fig tree that is my soul, the one that maybe just needs another year and a bit of fertilizer.

Lindsay Elford

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Epic Love Story

20/3/2025

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A Reflection on the Second Reading for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:
Third Sunday of Lent

1 Corinthians
10.1-6, 10-12

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud; all passed through the sea; all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.

Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.

Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.

These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

As an early reader, as a child I scoured my parents' bookshelves and the school library for books to challenge and delight me. I especially loved stories that were epic, had an excessive amount of detail, and featured callbacks to earlier parts of the story. In these stories, everything was important and every person in the story had a purpose.

When I first came to faith, I made a point of reading the Scriptures cover to cover. Now, this was long before Fr. Mike Schmitz launched the “Bible in a Year” study guide. Back then, it was just me and the Good News Bible I got at my confirmation. While I was reading to better understand the faith that had awakened in me, it was also a somewhat fun read because of how much it reminded me of my favourite epic stories.

When split up into its individual books, the Bible has wars, romance, intrigue, prophecies, and new kings crowned. It has poetry, aphorisms, despair, and hope. And that’s just the Old Testament!

But as a whole, the Bible tells one, beautiful, cohesive story – it is the story of God’s love for His creation. The Bible speaks that story to all of creation, to His chosen people, to the Church today, and to each of us. Every word of the Spirit-breathed Scriptures can be understood for each of those contexts.

In every story in the Bible, I can see myself in the place of both the good and the sinful. I can see myself as the Pharisee or as Peter denying Christ, but also as the Maccabees in the furnace and as Lazarus outside his own empty tomb.

I am both the sinner and the saved. The epic love story the Bible shares is the same one being lived out in my own heart every day. The call from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians applies to me just as much as it did to them.

So when Paul calls me to reflect on my spiritual ancestors, who like me were given so much and still chose sin over love, it is a stark reminder that I need this message because I have also been in that position. God continues to pursue me, to lift me up, and to save me. That truth resonates through the ages, illuminated in the pages of the Scriptures. God gave us the Bible to show us the depths of His love and also to guide us to more deeply embrace the saving work the Spirit is doing in us.

Heavenly Father, thank You for the blessing of the Scriptures. Through them, You offer me guidance, admonishment, and hope. May I be drawn ever closer to You in the reading of the Word, made aware of Your abiding love for me as Your daughter. AMEN.

Stéphanie Potter

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Can’t Get You Out of My Head

19/3/2025

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A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:
Third Sunday of Lent

Psalm 103

R. The Lord is merciful and gracious.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits.

R. The Lord is merciful and gracious.

It is the Lord who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.

R. The Lord is merciful and gracious.

The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.

R. The Lord is merciful and gracious.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him.

R. The Lord is merciful and gracious.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

My list of unusual but fascinating Scripture research resources is expanding by the month. My latest obsession is with a site that discusses biblical translations from lesser known global languages.

In the section on the line “and do not forget all his benefits,” this site discusses how the word most often translated as “forget” is represented in an Australian Aboriginal language. In their language, the word is dwangka-anbangbat, literally “ear-lose.”

Do not ear-lose God’s benefits. The rest of this reflection is my attempt to articulate how much that word rocks my world.

Because I am of a generation and demographic whose ears are highly prized, but crowded, real estate. Added to that, I’m a personality type prone to having things “in” my ears that I’m not currently hearing – “earworm” songs, words, phrases, sounds (I am very glad the Walmart self checkout doesn’t play a little ditty anymore…) or replaying conversations in my head, or rehearsing a potential future conversation…

Suffice it to say, I ear-lose God all the time. As the Cistercian monk Thomas Keating once said, “Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.” From our creation, God has loved us so that we may love Him, blessed us so we may bless Him, lavished us with gifts and asked only for contrition and heartfelt praise in return. He is always asking me not to ear-lose Him, but He’s also not going to stop me, or blow an airhorn to compete with whatever else has crowded Him out of my ear’s tiny studio apartment.

So then I tried to do some research about how I could work with my brain to better ear-keep God. I know Br. Keating would probably say “find more silence,” but sometimes that’s either not realistic or not enough. I want to hack what my brain is already good at – replaying music and phrases and engaging in internal dialogues.

Research shows that you’re more likely to get an earworm if you are relaxed and associate the song/phrase with positive emotions/memories. It’s like your brain gets pleasure from processing it, so it does it by itself for fun. Likewise, the song/phrase is much stickier if it’s repetitive and simple (makes sense… “oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine…”)

This is great news for ear-keepers! Repetitive, simple, and positive? We Catholics have that in spades, in prayers, music, and prayers-in-music, both ancient and contemporary (as our Carthusian friends will certainly endorse). There are both spoken and sung litanies, the Rosary, and chaplets. There’s Taize, mantra-based prayer, and, circling back to where we started, the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours.

So my homework is to be more intentional about engaging in ear-keeping practices and make use of my brain’s strengths to help me stay more attentive, more grateful, and more praise-filled.

My favourite “sticky” ear-keeping aids are the O Pure Virgin hymn to Mary, the sung Divine Mercy chaplet, and the most famous two Ave Marias.

What about you? If you can relate to my experience or have some suggestions, share your favourite ear-keepers in the comments of this post. Let's create an Ora ear-keeping repository and help each other discover some new ways to never forget God's rewards during this second lap of Lent!

Kate Mosher

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Looking for the Extraordinary

18/3/2025

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A Reflection on the First Reading for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:
Third Sunday of Lent

Exodus
3.1-8a, 13-15

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; Moses looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”

When the Lord saw that Moses had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.” Then God said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

God said further, “I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

But Moses said to God, “If I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and this my memorial for all generations.”

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

I have always been fascinated with the Exodus story and the burning bush that was “blazing, yet it was not consumed.” The Lord comes to me in extraordinary ways, BUT do I take time to watch for the extraordinary in my life or do I just put my head down and plow through? When I see the extraordinary, how do I respond? I can honestly say that in my own life I have seen the extraordinary and kept walking! That sounds crazy to write, but it is the truth; perhaps I am the only one who can say that, in which case you don’t need to read any further.

When Moses sees the bush he turns off his path to look more closely. God calls him by name and requests that Moses remove his sandals, because where God is, the ground is holy. So the next question I have to ask myself is, when I am in the midst of God and His holiness, how do I acknowledge that holiness?

I believe that the Eucharist is the burning bush of my life. My problem is that I often live my life with that “head down and plow through” attitude, and so I am only vaguely aware that the holy ground “I am standing on” is Jesus, present in the Most Blessed Sacrament. This is not me advocating for everyone to go barefoot to the altar. Rather, perhaps I need to recognize that the holiness that I am entering into in Mass should elicit a preparation, an interior change that opens my heart and soul to receive Him Who gives Himself freely to me.

This preparation/change is different for everyone. If I am a mother with small children, my preparation isn’t going to be a time of quiet, as it might be for a nun. If I am struggling with health issues my preparation will “look different” than that of a healthy person in some ways. I cannot compare my journey with anyone else.

There are many other burning bush moments in life, and as I journey in faith, I am called to seek the grace to see these moments and to recognize the holiness and respond to it as God calls me. This isn’t something that can be listed on paper, but it can be sought in prayer, trusting that God hears those prayers and answers them.

So, what was the purpose of the burning bush? To speak to Moses and prepare him to lead God’s people out of Egypt to the Promised Land. I am struck by the reality that the burning bush was not the end of a story or “happily ever after moment.” In fact, Moses’ life got a lot more complicated after that bush caught his attention.

The message I need to cling to in my life is that the God who said to Moses “I AM WHO I AM” is the God of the present. He is with me now and always. So, like Moses, I will leave the holy moment and experience the challenges and difficulties of life, but I will never experience them alone. God is with me!

Sister Teresa MacDonald

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Take a Leap (of Faith)

A Reflection on the Gospel for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:Third Sunday of Lent

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Epic Love Story

A Reflection on the Second Reading for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:Third Sunday of Lent

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Can’t Get You Out of My Head

A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:Third Sunday of Lent

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Looking for the Extraordinary

A Reflection on the First Reading for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:Third Sunday of Lent

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Archives

A Reflection on the Gospel for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:
Third Sunday of Lent

A Reflection on the Second Reading for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:
Third Sunday of Lent

A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:
Third Sunday of Lent

A Reflection on the First Reading for Sunday, March 23rd, 2025:
Third Sunday of Lent