Monday of the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: RB 14 The Celebration of Vigils on Feasts of Saints

Mass: 1 K 21:1-16; Resp Ps 5; Mt 5:38-42

Gandhi and his spinning wheel

When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.

More of the story: ‘Indeed, no one gave himself to the doing of evil in the sight of the Lord as did Ahab, urged on by his wife Jezebel’ (1 K 21:25). Jesus, Son of the Living God, grant us the strength to go the extra mile. Although included last month, the following from Br Christophe is worth repeating:

Love, it is you who reveal to me that other cheek—my best profile—the one that belongs to eternity, and it will be the only one without any possible duplicity or ambivalence. 

The other cheek: my profile of hope.

May I contemplate it in every man and woman.

It is yourself on the face of every living person.

It is the other cheek that a kiss reveals,

my face of light

that your gaze illumines.

(C. Lebreton, Born from the Gaze of God, p. 177)

After my enemy has slapped both my cheeks, he will have run out of cheeks to slap, and perhaps he will be ashamed. After I have given him both my tunic and coat, he will perhaps learn to have pity on my nakedness. If I go the second mile with him, perhaps he will give us both the needed time and shared experience to pass from animosity to friendship. Perhaps all his aggressiveness toward me comes from lack of imagination, from a real ignorance concerning what other courses were available to him besides injustice and violence. Perhaps my open hands and silent mouth become the most eloquent of teachers, and I will have won a brother in the Lord.

(Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis)