7th Week, Saturday, March 1st
Sirach
17:1-15
The Lord creates man; He made man in his image.
Years ago,
author Donald Cross Peattie used to write a lot of nature articles for the Reader's
Digest. In one of his writings he made this observation: If you ever find a
spider spinning a web, run and get your little boy or girl. "Lift your
child to see. Tell him that the shining silver
drawn out
of the spider's body has a greater tensile strength than steel. If he learns
admiration
instead of
disgust for the tiny spinner, he will have learned one of the greatest lessons
in nature-that all life is sacred." Today, more than ever in human
history, we need to stress that all life- especially human life- comes from the
hand of God. This is what makes it sacred.
***
How
profoundly do we reverence all life? "Every man's life is a fairy tale written
by God's fingers." Hans Christian Andersen
***
Introduction
Year I. Ben
Sirach reflects at length and with warmth on the first chapters of the Bible
dealing with creation. He stresses particularly the role of people as masters
and the center of creation. People, who organize creation, are or should be
responsible for creation and are the voice of all creation to praise God.
With human
progress in subduing the earth and traveling in space, we need today not merely
to glorify our conquests, but also refocus our attention on our role of
humanizers, which we have forgotten too much.
Opening
Prayer
Almighty
God and Father, creator of all that is, you have entrusted this earth and the
entire universe to us to develop and humanize it. Help us to take up our
responsibility of conserving and protecting nature, that you and our earth may
remain a place where people can breathe and live and let it be a foretaste of
the happiness of your eternal home. We ask you this through Christ our Lord.
***
1 March 2025; Mark 10:13-16
Opening the Doors of Faith: A Call to Welcome All
Jesus
rebuked His disciples for preventing children from coming to Him, not because
they were unkind, but because they thought they were protecting Jesus from the
‘nuisance’ and disturbances. They had done the same in Jericho, silencing the
blind man. They had unknowingly set up barriers between Jesus and those seeking
Him. This same mistake happens today when Christians, instead of facilitating
encounters with Christ, create obstacles.
How
often do we see people approaching the Church with hope, only to be met with
bureaucracy and coldness? An engaged couple excited for their marriage is given
a price list instead of a blessing. A young mother seeking Baptism for her
child is turned away because she is unmarried. These situations reveal a
dangerous tendency: controlling faith rather than fostering it. In doing so, we
create an “eighth sacrament”—the sacrament of exclusion—something Jesus never
intended.
Christ’s
invitation is for all. He did not come for the perfect, but for the broken, the
seeking, the struggling. His Church must be a place of welcome, a home for all
who long for God’s love. If we truly want to be Pilgrims of Hope in this
Jubilee Year, we must open wide the doors of faith. Let us choose compassion
over judgment, encouragement over rejection, and accompaniment over
bureaucracy.
Lord,
grant us hearts that welcome, hands that serve, and words that heal. May every
person who approaches the Church find open doors leading to Your infinite love.
Amen!
