Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production, Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. Share this program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Today we celebrate the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time. Opening Prayer Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity, so that unhindered in mind and body alike, we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.
Amen. A Reading from the Old Testament from the book of wisdom 61216 resplendent and unfading is Wisdom, and she is readily perceived by those who love her, and found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known in anticipation of their desire. Whoever watches for her at dawn shall not be disappointed, for he shall find her sitting by his gate. For taking thought of wisdom is the perfection of prudence and whoever for her sake keeps vigil shall quickly be free from care, because she makes her own rounds seeking those worthy of her, and graciously appears to them in the ways, and meets them with all solicitude. The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord, my God.
A reading from the New Testament St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians 4:13 we do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, about those who have fallen asleep, that you may not grieve like the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep. Indeed we tell you this on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel, with the trumpet of God will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
Thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore console one another with these words. The Word of the Lord Hallelujah Verse Stay awake and be ready for you do not know what day Your Lord will come. The gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Matthew 25th chapter, first through the 13th verse. Jesus told his disciples this parable.
The kingdom of heaven will be like 10 virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones, when taking their lamps, brought no oil with them. But the wise brought flasks of oil with their lamps. Since the bridegroom was long delayed, they all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight there was a cry, behold, the bridegroom.
Come out to meet him. Then all those virgins got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out. But the wise ones replied, no, for they may not be enough for you and for us. Go instead to the merchants and buy some for yourselves. While they went off to buy it, the bridegroom came.
And those who were ready went into the wedding feast with him. The door was locked. Afterwards the other virgins came and said, lord, Lord, open the door for us. But he said in reply, amen, I say to you, I do not know you, therefore stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour. The Gospel of the Lord Today’s readings are like many of them that come at the end of a cycle of readings are like going back over some core main teachings of the Scriptures. And this set of readings is loaded.
And what it’s talking about is first and foremost, if I go to the second reading, I see in that a way of reminding everybody that this world that we live in is temporary. It’s hard for me to hold on to that at times, and probably for you. I mean, we’re not made for this. If we’re looking for the world to be a place where we’re, you know, we’re easily fulfilled and it’s all working together perfectly. That’s never going to happen. What seems to me is that we’re in a place where we are working with both the truth and that which is against the truth.
Wisdom, and the opposite of wisdom, which is, you might say, a lie. So what we have in this reading is a reminder that one day we’re ultimately made first and foremost for union with God. That’s our goal. And we will one day be with him in this mysterious place, and we will have our bodies back. And it’s the teaching on the resurrection of the body, which is crazy when you think about it. In a way.
How is it that all of us who have ever existed are all going to live with our bodies in this wonderful place. That’s the promise. And when it doesn’t fit into our way of understanding, that means we’re too much stuck in the brain and we have to move to the heart, where things like this, mysterious things can be embraced and understood and believed in. So then we go to the issue of wisdom. And wisdom is so important to understand. What it means is that wisdom could be interpreted in my way of seeing it as reality.
Knowing what is real, knowing what is true. And this truth is in us. It is all around us. It is speaking to us constantly. And I love the images of the feminine wisdom. That is like, if you’re paying attention to her and you say, God, I wish she was here, you’ll open the door and there she is.
I mean, she is wisdom, this truth that we’re longing for is everywhere. It’s reflected in everything that’s happening in the world. If we have the way eyes to see with the heart and not the mind, the mind judges things as good or bad. The heart is open to the mystery of what’s going on and what is it saying to us. There’s one thing that’s going on in our world today, at least in our country, we’re looking at an election, and we’re looking at the thing that makes our country so great, is that the decisions that are made as far as the direction of our country are in the hands of the people, not just those leaders. And we can choose our leaders and make decisions.
And that’s a powerful, wonderful thing to imagine that we have that gift. And yet what we’re realizing now is that there’s a split in the way we both weigh this country, the direction of it, and that’s disunity. And in a way, there’s something valuable about pondering that what is this that separates us? And I want us to go to this next. It’s just the separation. Things that separate us are the antithesis of what wisdom is calling us into.
Wisdom is calling us into unity, oneness, oneness with God, oneness with who God intended us to be. Understanding that our role here on this planet is to be connected and in union with other people. And through that union, to carry something that’s been given to us as our unique gift, amplified by the presence of God, divinity inside of us. And we resonate that to one another. And the effectiveness of that is union, communion, oneness. And we’re so aware, I think, in the culture that we’re living in right now, of the things that divide us and the things that divide us are based in a mind that is filled with judgment.
And then that judgment leads to a kind of acceptance, rejection of what is different, of what isn’t understood. Or we think about it in a way that when I think about judgment, I think about it as living in a world that’s binary and that things are either good or bad. So a binary world is filled with judgment. And just think about it, how we judge people so quickly. I mean, look at the decisions that we’re making over two different leaders and the judgments we have about them. You know, we’ve decided one is good and one is bad.
And that’s not true. They’re all a mixture of good and bad. And somehow wisdom is the one place where we can go, where we begin to understand that mystery. We’re called for unity, oneness. And that unity and oneness is the result of an heart that is open to wisdom, and it moves us in that direction. So let’s go to the gospel.
It’s so powerful. Parable. What’s it talking about? Wisdom. What’s the image of wisdom? Oil.
Oil is that thing that the 10 women that were to guide the groom to his wedding, which is an image of the movement, of the effectiveness of wisdom is to move us always to. Towards union and communion with one another, with ourselves, with God. And that union can only happen if there is a kind of energy, a sense inside of us. It’s a sense of reality, the way the world really is. And when you have a sense of that and it’s in you and it resonates out of you when you’re not quick to judge, when you don’t live in a binary world where somebody who can be judged because of one action. I mean, I think so many people today, you can have a life of goodness and doing all kinds of things, and then something happens and you’re judged by that one action, that one thing, that one picture on the Internet, and they write you off because they say, well, goodness and evil can’t live in the same person.
If you’ve done one evil thing, then you’re evil. It’s insanity, that kind of judgment. And the oil is the wisdom of understanding reality. That we are this incredibly powerful, beautiful mystery of goodness and evil. And we’re struggling and we’re moving. And what we need is less judgment and more understanding and more compassion for each other.
And the more we can unify and become one, the quicker we will move into a world of fullness and an environment in which people truly flourish. So let’s look at these women in the story. Their job was to get the groom to get to the bride and to have a wedding and beautiful thing about weddings, at least I’ve done a zillion weddings in my life. They’re the best parties ever. I know in Italy, where I spend a lot of time, a wedding is usually in the afternoon on Saturday. And then they gather usually in a place or if it’s out in the country, they have a big tent by their homes.
And then they party from late afternoon until the morning. And it’s. Why is it so we don’t do that at birthdays or anniversaries or even Christmas or Easter. It’s. Why are weddings so enthusiastically embraced if they aren’t some archetype or some metaphor for something that we’re all longing for? Unity and oneness.
When two people find something within each other that is life giving and they recognize they each have a unique gift for each other and they. They fall in love, we call it. And that means that they are convinced that this person is someone that they are going to receive something wonderful from and they’re going to want to give something wonderful to. And let’s call that thing that we give each other is understanding, Wisdom, reality checks over and over again. I’ve never been married, but I know that if I was, there’d be so many decisions I probably wouldn’t have made the way I would because somebody would be saying, are you sure that you want to do that? And right now, in my personal stuff, I make my own decisions.
But there’s something about a loving presence of someone else that knows that the goal of union, I mean, let’s say the unity is a means of a goal that is a flow of life and love and truth between two people and what a gift that is. And if we understand that this beautiful call to unity and oneness is at the heart of what it means to be alive, to be here, then the knowledge of how the world works, the knowledge of an aspect of God called the spirit of God, which is feminine. I think it’s so fascinating. And this feminine wisdom is seeking you and me and not looking at us like a judgmental male figure that is sort of saying, you know, unless you shape up, I’m not going to be even interested in giving you any information. You know, clean up your act and then we’ll treat you with dignity and respect. Wisdom looks at you and says, you are filled with potential.
You’re filled with something that is uniquely yours. And. And you’re here in the world to share it with someone else in a group of people. That’s reality. And this oil that I’m trying to place in your heart is this knowledge that I, and only I, wisdom, can give you. And it’s.
Those worthy of this great gift are just simply the ones who sit there and say, I want to know. I want to see. I want to know what. Who I am and why I’m here. And that’s so different than living in a world of simply walking around and judging everyone and separating people because of judgment. And anybody that’s different is considered to be suspect and a little bit scary to some people.
And we categorize people and divide people. It’s the sin of the world. Disunity, separation, isolation. So funny. This pandemic is creating an artificial separation, isolation just to give us a sense of what it is like to lose that union and communion that we so long for. And all right, so now we’re doing it to protect each other from a disease.
But think of it as a. As the pandemic is a teacher. Just like everything is a teacher. Wisdom works with every single thing in the world to give you and me a better perspective on what we’re here for and what this world’s about. So if we live in a world where we’re conscious of protecting one another from that which harms us, that makes us sick, that could even kill us. If we knew that that was the judgment that we have toward each other, that.
That feeling of being right when you can point to everybody else as being wrong, that addiction is a disease because what it does is it kills the uniqueness in every person that God has created. We need to live in an environment in an atmosphere of radical acceptance of differences and stop judging people over one action. Stop saying you have a life of service to everyone, a marriage that’s long and been wonderful. And then if there’s one mistake made because of a drunken night or because of some, I don’t know, some mistake, some misjudgment, and you’re written off as some kind of predator, some kind of adulterer or whatever. Mistakes, mistakes, they’re made, you know, yeah, we pay attention to them, but we don’t judge the person as if they are the mistake. Because we want somehow to be a vehicle of wisdom to this person who’s struggling to us as we struggle.
In a way, it seems so simple when you understand the goal of religion. Unity, oneness, togetherness. And that’s because we have this gift of truth given to every individual. And that beautiful image at the end of that parable when these foolish people come and say, hey God, I’m here, let me in. And he looks at him and says, I don’t recognize you. Wasn’t that a perfect image of what it’s like to live in a lie?
That you aren’t yourself, you aren’t who God made you to be because you’re afraid of that, or you don’t know that yet? What a horrible thought that you live a long life on this planet. You don’t become who you are, and therefore you can’t be the source of life and truth and wisdom. You’re called to be foreign the Closing Prayer the gift of your wisdom is the greatest gift you have offered us. Open our hearts to embrace the mystery of life, the mystery of why we’re here and what you call us to be. And let us focus on those things that bring life to us and to one another.
It’s called the kingdom. It’s called Christian community. It’s called family. It’s called love. So bless us with wisdom as we seek this gift and help us to bring it to everyone, everyone on our planet. And we ask this in Jesus name.
Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner. For this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible.
Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher Produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Records Reflections Institute Studios Copyright 2020.
