October 6, 2024
27th Sunday
Ordinary Time
FOCUS: God desires for us to love and be loved, as he loves.
From the very beginning, the Lord made us to not be alone: we were created for relationship with him and with one another. There is something truly worthy of awe – awesome – in knowing that God, the Creator of the Universe and all things, desires for us to love and be loved, as he loves. We are not just his Creation, we are his children. His only Son is our brother. The kingdom belongs to us, if we embrace it with the childlike wonder it deserves.
What's in Your Heart
The original covenant of love was initiated by God. God made that covenant with our spiritual ancestors and commits to that covenant with each one of us today. Commitments and relationships and connections are at the heart of the questions posed in this week’s readings.
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What are the actions I use to shore up my own commitments to the community I serve and the significant people in my life?
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How can I keep my own commitments life-enhancing?
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What do I need to recommit so that God’s love keeps flowing in my relationships with others and in my relationship with God?
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Homily Stories
I've been married dozens of times—all to the same woman. In any relationship you have to keep committing and recommitting as times and circumstances change and you come to know more about your partner and yourself. And so a marriage is not a wedding day but a series of decisions to be for and with the other person “for better or for worse.”
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Sometimes the internal recommitment comes when you notice your attention drifting away to competing interests. Sometimes it comes after a fight. Sometimes it takes the form of deciding to fight to deal with all those resentments you’ve both been storing up. And sometimes you look across the dinner table and recognize the person you fell in love with long ago, and that memory re-energizes your life together.
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Through the years there will be plenty of opportunities to let your relationships wither and die. Yet the invitation is not just to endure but to access the love that once called you, to enter again into the dreams of your younger days, and to let your loving commitment blossom and grow in the midst of today’s reality—however difficult that might be. This is the ideal. We all fall short, giving us yet more opportunities to renew those commitments to the best of our ability.
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The promise at the heart of marriage is the promise God makes to each of us: “Whenever it comes time to decide again, it’s a foregone conclusion that I will always and everywhere side with you.”
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First Reading
Second Reading
Quotes
Pure, holy simplicity confounds all the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of the flesh.
—Francis of Assisi
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God intended the Earth with everything contained in it for the use of all human beings and peoples.
—Gaudium et spes