The onion woman
Once upon a time there was a wicked peasant woman. When she died, she did not leave a single good deed behind, so the devils took her and plunged her into a lake of fire.
Her guardian angel stood and tried to think of some good deed she had performed so that the angel could plead for her before God. Finally, he remembered something; it was not a very big thing, but it was something with which he could plead her case before God.
The onion woman
Once upon a time there was a wicked peasant woman. When she died, she did not leave a single good deed behind, so the devils took her and plunged her into a lake of fire.
Her guardian angel stood and tried to think of some good deed she had performed so that the angel could plead for her before God. Finally, he remembered something; it was not a very big thing, but it was something with which he could plead her case before God.
“Lord, she once pulled up an onion in her garden and gave it to a poor beggar,” the angel said to God.
From Fr. Jude Botelho:
The destruction of their city and the temple by the Babylonians shattered the Israelites. They needed encouragement and this came through the prophet Isaiah. When Isaiah wrote his poem, Jerusalem was still in ruins. The city’s plight had come to symbolize that of God’s people: once God’s spouse, she was rejected, divorced, so to speak, a barren widow devoid of children. But her beloved husband, the Lord promises to return to his bride. There will be a New Jerusalem which would prove to the people that God is faithful to his promises. Her shame will be removed and she will be ‘God’s delight’ the ‘wedded one’. God will bring about the change. He will change the water of Jewish religion into true wine.
From Fr. Jude Botelho:
The people of Israel had shown signs of repentance for their sins, and received from God a promise of consolation: the glory of the Lord will be revealed. The passage from the first of the Servant songs refers to a servant figure who could point to the forthcoming messiah. In the liturgy today, this servant is identified with Jesus, who is manifested as such in his baptism. The latter part of the servant songs speaks of the task of the servant: to establish peace on earth, to be a covenant to Israel, a revelation to the gentiles, and to proclaim the liberation of captives. The description of the servant aptly fit Jesus and his future ministry.Moment of decisionA moment of decision can be thrust upon a person like a bolt out of the blue. This happened to the Dubliner, Matt Talbot. He was drinking himself to death. One day he was standing outside a pub, begging the price of a drink from people he considered his friends. But they passed him by. Suddenly the scales fell from his eyes. He saw that he was destroying himself, and he made a decision to give up drinks, and to try, with the help of God, to become a saint. Or this moment may come upon a person gradually, as happened to Mother Teresa. She was working for well-off girls in a Loreto convent school in Calcutta. But meanwhile she was becoming more and more uneasy about the fact that poor people were lying uncared for on the streets just outside the convent walls. One day she left her convent and went to work among the poor. Her name became a byword for devotion to the abandoned.
Anonymous
