One Minute Reflection – 15 February – Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year C – Today’s First Reading: Genesis 3:1-8 and the Memorial of St Claude de la Colombiere (1641-1682) Apostle of the Sacred Heart and Blessed Michal Sopoćko (1888-1975) Apostle of Divine Mercy
“The woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her and he ate it.”...Genesis 3:6
REFLECTION – “Those who have been tricked into taking poison, offset its harmful effect, by another drug. The remedy, moreover, just like the poison, has to enter the system, so that its remedial effect, may thereby spread through the whole body. Similarly, having tasted the poison, that is the fruit, that dissolved our nature, we were necessarily in need of something to reunite it. Such a remedy had to enter into us, so that it might by its counteraction, undo the harm the body had already encountered from the poison. And what is this remedy? Nothing else, than the body that proved itself superior to death and became the source of our life.”…St Gregory of Nyssa (c 335–c395) Father of the Church (Catechetical Oration, 27)
PRAYER – Heavenly Father, Your great mercy, gave us Your Son! Surely nothing can be a greater proof to us of Your unending love and mercy to Your lowly creatures, we who are dust. Through Him, who died and rose for us, You have shown us the way of true mercy. Grant us this day that by the intercession of St Claude and Blessed Michal, we may take up our crosses with Him, never leaving the love of His Sacred Heart, so that we may join Your holy saints in eternal life. Through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in union with the Holy Spirit, one God forever, amen.
AnaStpaul 