Exposed

A Reflection on the Second Reading for July 31st, 2022:
​Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

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​Colossians
3.1-15, 9-11

Brothers and sisters: If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry.

Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.

In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

Maturity is hard. There’s no way to sugar coat it. Even though Saint Paul writes about the maturation process beautifully and with conviction, make no mistake: it was hard for him, too. Every single one of us has weaknesses — Achilles’ heels. Saints don’t become saints without obstacles to overcome. If their lives were merely a series of clouds that they floated between from birth to death, they would not have had the opportunity to enact their surrender to God’s will — the opportunity to marry their wills to His in turning away from the darkness and grasping for the Light. 

The lives of saints are riddled with struggle: illness, persecution, poverty, and desire. They all gave in to these struggles at times. When the rubber hit the road, though, they made their ultimate destiny God’s eternal embrace: the road to victory, a freedom like no other, and, also, a series of prayerful, difficult choices made one small step at a time.

I personally stumble clumsily through this process as I attempt to walk a path of integrity and holiness. My Achilles’ heel is passion. Passion leads me into a number of areas of sinfulness when I act on it impulsively, but it can also lead me into places of great good. The tricky part for me is in discerning when the passion is leading me to goodness, and when it is leading me into darkness. More often than not, I see my error in hindsight, but as I come to know myself more — as I come to prayer more — I am learning to see passion stirring within me before it spills out all over the place and makes a terrible mess.

This is not a maturation I’ve come to by way of my own stellar volition — it is coming to me slowly each time I allow my passion to spill out, bounce off someone else, and then find myself facing the difficult task of attempting to clean up the mess I’ve made. I believe the precise moment I experience the greatest growth is in the merciful response of God and the way the one I’ve hurt receives my apology. It is their heart that converts mine. It is the love of God, present in the confessional or in the hearts of others, that heals me and challenges me to do better. And it is God’s great goodness received in prayer that provides me with the courage to face the other in honesty and repentance.

Saint Paul says, “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.” Prayer reveals God’s knowledge of my sin and renews me in His image — the image I was created in, that I have fallen away from, and that He continually calls me back to.

My prayer today is that we may all come to live so authentically that we refuse to hide our sinful tendencies, but instead continually expose them to the Light so that He might release us into the freedom of true Love. Amen.




Lori MacDonald

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