Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

Year of Saint Joseph

Year of the Family "Amoris Laetitia The Joy of Love"

Saints: Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus

Readings of the Day

RB: Ch 48:10-21 The Daily Manual Labor

Mass: 1 Jn 4:7-16; Resp Ps 34 or Ex 40:16-21, 34-38; Resp Ps 84; Jn 11:19-27 or Lk 10:38-42

Glorify the Lord with me.

JESUS ENTERED A VILLAGE WHERE A WOMAN WHOSE NAME WAS MARTHA WELCOMED HIM. SHE HAD A SISTER NAMED MARY WHO SAT BESIDE THE LORD AT HIS FEET LISTENING TO HIM SPEAK.

(Lk 10:38-39)

For some years, a friend of happy memory would give me a stack of 52 cards for my birthday, one for each week of the year. On each of the cards, usually a mixed collection of postcards, greeting cards and holy cards, was written a quotation. The quotations often, but not always, were all taken from the same book. For example, the first year had quotations from Gertrude the Great's The Herald of Divine Love. Another year had random quotations from here and there. Another year was dedicated to Adrienne von Speyer's Three Women and the Lord (Ignatius 1986). I still have all the cards from each year and today will share words from Three Women and the Lord, fitting for today's memorial. First though, a few words about the Holy Rule. We are once again in another one of my favorite chapters, Ch 48 The Daily Manual Labor. It is in the first verse that Saint Benedict says, "Idleness is the enemy of the soul." Martha is pleased with that. Saint Benedict goes on though: "Therefore, the brothers should have specified periods for manual labor as well as for prayerful reading." Mary is pleased too. 😊

As we contemplate the Lord on His journey it is axiomatic that love inspires His steps. It comes from the Father and goes to the Father and all the time He is in the Father. On His way He meets a woman and she too does something out of love; she takes Him into her house. This woman is like the rod of the tree, and her sister is the fruit ...

Here again there are three aspects to love: the Lord on His journey, Martha's activity and in the background, shining through her, the tranquil being of Martha's sister. This contemplative "being" on the part of Mary of Bethany will turn out to be the highest response that human love can make to the Lord. But this love would be impossible unless it drew its life from the Lord Himself; nor could it issue in any expression without the meditation of Martha's activity, which brought her and the Lord together ...

At first love is as it were latent; the Lord, journeying here and there, is its pure, invisible radiance, and Mary is its pure, invisible expectation. Martha's action releases it into visibility, causing its hidden energy to explode. 

(Adrienne von Speyer, Three Women and the Lord, pp. 85, 87) 

SAINTS MARTHA, MARY, AND LAZARUS,

SAINT JOSEPH,

PRAY FOR US.

Today's photo: Monastery daphne.

© Gertrude Feick 2021