One Minute Reflection – 1 December – Today’s Gospel: Luke 21:34–36,Saturday of the Thirty Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year B and The Memorial of St Edmund Campion (1540-1581) and Bl Charles of Jesus/Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916) Both Martyrs
“But take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life and that day come upon you suddenly like a snare”…Luke 21:34
REFLECTION – ““But take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life and that day come upon you suddenly like a snare.” You heard the proclamation of the eternal King. You learned the deplorable end of “drunkenness” or “intoxication.” Imagine a skilled and wise physician who would say, “Beware, no one should drink too much from this or that herb. If he does, he will suddenly be destroyed.” I do not doubt that everyone would keep the prescriptions of the physician’s warning concerning his own health. Now the Lord, who is both the physician of souls and bodies, orders them to avoid as a deadly drink, the herb “of drunkenness” and the vice “of intoxication” and also the care of worldly matters. I do not know if anyone can say, that he is not wounded, because these things consume him.
Drunkenness is therefore destructive in all things. It is the only thing that weakens the soul together with the body. According to the apostle, it can happen that when the body “is weak,” then the spirit is “much stronger,” and when “the exterior person is destroyed, the interior person is renewed.” In the illness of drunkenness, the body and the soul are destroyed at the same time. The spirit is corrupted equally with the flesh. All the members are weakened, the feet and the hands. The tongue is loosened. Darkness covers the eyes. Forgetfulness covers the mind so that one does not know himself nor does he perceive he is a person.
Drunkenness of the body has that shamefulness.”…Origen (Homilies on Leviticus, 7) – (part 2 of Pope Benedict’s reflections on Origen) comments on this verse from the Gospel proclaimed at Mass today.
PRAYER – Let us praise You alone, Lord, with voice and mind and deed and since life itself is Your gift, may we live in Your presence, never ceasing to live as Your children of light. Strengthen us good Father, to keep our lives free from the evils of the world and may we constantly be aware of the dangers we face. Grant that by the intercession of St Edmund Campion and Blessed Charles de Foucauld, we may remain untempted by the evil pursuits which beset us. Through Jesus our Lord, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever, amen.
AnaStpaul 