Seeking the best for you

The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary today invite consideration of prayer and contemplation as ways to identify loving action in contrast to appeals to our ego and greed.

Seeking the best

In the passage from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, the apostle includes his policy of preaching without charge as part of his defense of the truth.

* [11:4] Preaches another Jesus: the danger is specified, and Paul’s opponents are identified with the cunning serpent. The battle for minds has to do with the understanding of Jesus, the Spirit, the gospel; the Corinthians have flirted with another understanding than the one that Paul handed on to them as traditional and normative.1 

In Psalm 111 a Temple singer tells how God is revealed in Israel’s history.

* [Psalm 111] A Temple singer (Ps 111:1) tells how God is revealed in Israel’s history (Ps 111:2–10). The deeds reveal God’s very self, powerful, merciful, faithful. The poem is an acrostic, each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet2 

The Gospel from Matthew presents The Lord’s Prayer as Jesus instruction on how not to babble as the pagans.

 * [6:9–13] Matthew’s form of the “Our Father” follows the liturgical tradition of his church. Luke’s less developed form (Luke 11:2–4) also represents the liturgical tradition known to him, but it is probably closer than Matthew’s to the original words of Jesus.3

Andy Alexander, S.J. comments it is so good to reflect upon the prayer Jesus taught us, so that we'll be less likely the "babble on".

May your name be holy... Your Spirit is Holiness itself. From your sanctifying Spirit all holiness comes. By your grace, may I be able to bless your holy name today.
May your Kingdom come... All that I am and whatever I do, including all my choices and relationships are about how your Kingdom, your reign, might come into this world…
May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven... Free our world from greed and lust for power that is the root of conflict and division, and which leads to all injustice and the indignities against human life itself.
Give us this day our daily bread... Let Jesus be bread - bread that gives life. Continue to nourish us and sustain us in times that feel like famine.
Forgive us our tresspasses...ask you to forgive us all... let us all forgive anyone who has sinned against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us. Protect us from all the traps that are out there for us every day… because they've become a part of our patterns.4  

Don Schwager asks us to consider what John Cassian (360-435 AD), an early church father who lived for several years with the monks in Bethlehem and Egypt before founding a monastery in southern Gaul, wrote about the Lord's Prayer and the necessity of forgiving one another from the heart.

"The mercy of God is beyond description. While he is offering us a model prayer he is teaching us a way of life whereby we can be pleasing in his sight. But that is not all. In this same prayer he gives us an easy method for attracting an indulgent and merciful judgment on our lives. He gives us the possibility of ourselves mitigating the sentence hanging over us and of compelling him to pardon us. What else could he do in the face of our generosity when we ask him to forgive us as we have forgiven our neighbor? If we are faithful in this prayer, each of us will ask forgiveness for our own failings after we have forgiven the sins of those who have sinned against us, not only those who have sinned against our Master. There is, in fact, in some of us a very bad habit. We treat our sins against God, however appalling, with gentle indulgence - but when by contrast it is a matter of sins against us ourselves, albeit very tiny ones, we exact reparation with ruthless severity. Anyone who has not forgiven from the bottom of the heart the brother or sister who has done him wrong will only obtain from this prayer his own condemnation, rather than any mercy."5 

The Word Among Us Meditation on Matthew 6:7-15 comments on Corrie ten Boom, imprisoned in the infamous Ravensbruck concentration camp, and her forgiveness of one of the Ravensbruck prison guards.

“And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on his. When he tells us to love our enemies, he gives, along with the command, the love itself.”6 

Friar Jude Winkler comments on the “angry letter” of 2 Corinthians and the likelihood of a transposition of sections in the modern version of the letter. The address of God as “Abba” is a paradigm shift in 1st century Jewish spirituality. Friar Jude notes the value of affirmation of others in becoming forgiving people open to accepting forgiveness to others.

Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, declares Love is the ultimate reality. We can probably see this only through the inner dialogue we call prayer. For love is first of all hidden. We don’t see it unless we learn how to see more deeply, unless we clean the lens. The Zen masters call it wiping the mirror. In a clear mirror, we can see exactly what’s there without distortion—not what we’re afraid of or wish were there. Wiping the mirror is the inner discipline of constantly observing my own patterns, what I pay attention to and what I don’t pay attention to, in order to get my own ego out of the way, until I can be held by a foundational goodness and acceptance.

 St. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) admonished: “For the most part all [our] trials and disturbances come from our not understanding ourselves.” [2] This is also the way St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) practiced her “science of love.” She was always aware of how her own thoughts and feelings could get in the way of her “vocation” of love. We must learn to observe our own stream of consciousness and see how it blocks the natural response of love.7

The practice of prayer invites the inner dialogue through which we are inspired to move toward a loving disposition of seeking the best for the other including our forgiveness of any evil they may have advanced toward us.

References

1	(n.d.). 2 Corinthians, chapter 1 - United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Retrieved June 20, 2019, from http://www.usccb.org/bible/2corinthians/11
2	(n.d.). Psalms, chapter 111 - United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Retrieved June 20, 2019, from http://www.usccb.org/bible/psalms/111
3	(n.d.). Matthew, chapter 6 - United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Retrieved June 20, 2019, from http://www.usccb.org/bible/matthew/6
4	(n.d.). Creighton U Daily Reflections - OnlineMinistries - Creighton University. Retrieved June 20, 2019, from http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/daily.html
5	(n.d.). Daily Scripture Readings and Meditations. Retrieved June 20, 2019, from https://dailyscripture.servantsoftheword.org/
6	(n.d.). 11th Week in Ordinary Time - Mass Readings and Catholic Daily .... Retrieved June 20, 2019, from https://wau.org/meditations/2019/06/20/
7	(n.d.). Love Is a Mirror — Center for Action and Contemplation. Retrieved June 20, 2019, from https://cac.org/love-is-a-mirror-2019-06-20/