My name is Don and I’ve been a Catholic priest now for over 50 years, and during that time I keep going back to the same readings over and over again, only to discover that they contain something I never understood was there before. It gives me new enthusiasm and excitement for the message that keeps revealing itself, and I pray that the message that I’m sending you will be valuable, and if you find it so, please share these podcasts with your friends. Thank you. Good morning. Today we celebrate the eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Before we enter into the readings, I’d like to just tell you once again how excited I am about my new audience and my new listeners.

And I’ve been receiving notes from you, and they’re positive, which is great. But anyway, thank you for taking the time to let me know you’re there and how you feel about the OUR program. So now let’s turn to the opening prayer of this liturgy and open our hearts to the wisdom that’s in the readings. Let us pray. Grant us, O Lord, we pray that the course of our world may be directed by your peaceful rule, and that your church may rejoice untroubled in her devotion 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 Sirach, 27th, chapter four through the seventh verse. When a sieve is shaken, the husks appear, so do one’s fault when one speaks as a test of what the potter molds is in the furnace, so in tribulation is the test of the justice. The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had. So too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind. Praise no one before he speaks, for it is then that people are tested. The Word of the Lord.

Responsorial Psalm Lord, it is good to give thanks to you. It is good to give thanks to the Lord to sing praise to your name most High, to proclaim your kindness at dawn and your faithfulness throughout the night. Lord, it is good to give thanks to you. The just one shall flourish like the palm tree, Like a cedar of Lebanon shall he grow there all planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. O Lord, it is good to give thanks to you. They shall bear fruit even in old age Vigorous and sturdy shall they be declaring how just is the Lord, my rock, in whom there is no wrong.

Lord, it is good to give thanks to you. A reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 15 Fourth to the 58th verse Brothers and sisters, when this which is corruptible clothes itself with incorruptibility, and this which is mortal clothes itself with immortality, then the word that is written shall come about. Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. The Word of the Lord Hallelujah. Verse Shine like lights on the world as you hold on to the word of life. Hallelujah.

The gospel for this 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time is taken from St. Luke 6:39 to the 45th verse. Jesus told his disciples a parable Can a blind man guide a blind person will not both fall into a pit. No disciple is superior to the teacher, but when they are fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own? How can you say to your brother, brother, let me remove the splinter in your eye when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?

You hypocrite, remove the beam from your eye first, then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye. A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit, for every tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not pick figs from thorn bushes, for people do not pick figs from thorn bushes, nor do they gather grapes from brambles. A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil. For from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks the Gospel of the Lord. Ram Sam this is a very interesting set of readings to me because it seems that we’re talking about things that are not necessarily the classic things that you think of that religion is drawing you into.

It almost feels more like these readings are written by a therapist who’s concerned about your well being, is concerned about your growth and your integration, becoming a person of authenticity, integrity. So I was reading the reading from Corinthians. That last paragraph really struck me, and it said we should be devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. Meaning if you do God’s work, which is certainly something that we have to produce, something on our end, meaning trust, openness, receptivity, honesty. But the real work of the work of the Lord is God working through you, working in you, being a part of you. And that’s what I think he means when he talks about when the corruptible is clothed with incorruptibility, the mortal clothes itself with immortality.

We have a human nature. We all know our human nature. It’s got a selfish side to it. It’s got a kind of primitive thing it goes back to over and over again. And that makes total sense to me. We don’t evolve and grow into a totally different person.

We grow into a person that has a kind of integration of the old and the new, the selfish and the selfless. And so this work of God that is giving us a taste of divinity, a presence of divinity in our very being, we can rely upon that, we go to that. And it has a wonderful potential to lift us beyond a kind of self centered selfishness into other centeredness. That other centeredness is always, always concerned about the well being of another person. It wants the other person to become everything they’re intended to be, everything they long to be. And you know, Paul also talks about what it is that when people are not in the right relationship with each other, something is raging, some enemy has entered in, and it’s called S.

And the power of sin is interesting. It comes from rules and laws. And I don’t know whether you feel it this way, but sometimes we can have regulations in our way of seeing ourselves or the way we expect other people to act or to do their thing, whatever it is. And it’s so interesting to me that there is this kind of power of expecting things to be a certain way that would be our own set of rules and laws that get in the way of our being in union with each other. Because sin comes from rules and regulations. Having to be someone you’re supposed to be expecting other people, they should be who they’re supposed to be.

And if you want a real understanding of the effects of sin in your life, it’s always going to be separation, separation and that separation when it comes to our relationships with each other, even our relationship with ourselves, is that whole issue of judgment. We talked about it last week and it’s again in this set of readings, stop judging. Isn’t it interesting that of all the things that Jesus has said about what we need to be, the one thing we seem to just have such A hard time paying attention to. Because in my experience, religious people can be the most judgmental, the most critical, the most always evaluating other people’s performance or we even, I mean, as a Catholic priest, you know, growing up after Vatican ii, I was, it seemed like I entered into a church that initially, back in that would be the mid-60s, was divided between those who believed this. New ideas, the new ideas of the council were so wonderful and exciting and others felt they were detrimental to the regular way in which they understood religion. And there was all this tension and it was always, you were judged.

Are you a pro Vatican II or a anti Vatican 2? It was crazy. And it’s always been that way in my life. It seems I’ve entered into the world of religion at a time, at least within the Catholic Church, that there’s always this division. And so when I’m thinking about what this, you know, way of imagining people should be a certain way that imagine that as a kind of rule in our psyche we say, okay, this is the way people should act. This is what it means to be Catholic, this is what it means to be Christian.

This is what it means to be a good person. If we have those set regulations in our mind, then we can’t listen, can’t listen to another person without judging them. And the judgment immediately sets up a separation. We’re somehow looking down on them, or if we happen to judge them as much more intelligent and much more well read or well formed in what they’re talking about. We can feel that they’re elevated above us and we feel separated that way. But if you can imagine the real work, the real work of the gospel in your heart and in my heart is to be connecting to people.

To be connecting, not judging, not evaluating, but listening to them, paying attention to them, wanting something in your own mind, I’ll call it your intention that they become fully who they’re intended to be. And you listen not with judgment, but with interest and curiosity. I’ve tried to do this and it’s interesting. I think like a lot of people, I can be competitive. And especially if somebody else is talking about maybe their spiritual life or their work or they’re talking about another priest’s work. And I can start comparing myself to them and feeling, oh my God, they’re better than I am, or oh, I’m so much better than they are.

All that stuff immediately sets up a division. And the last thing that God’s work is engaged in is dividing us. It’s always drawing us into each other. And so if we play with this image of judgment as a sin that is therefore causing separation and isolation from people. And I think it’s interesting that Paul goes on to say that, you know, the sting of death is sin. And I think, you know, I don’t know if this is what this means, but it’s fascinating to me to think about it.

Does that mean that the thing that really frightens us about our death is whether or not we’ve sinned or not, or whether or not we’re really forgiven by the God who says he is filled with forgiveness. So there it is again. Sin is division, division between human beings and division between ourselves and a God who said, I’m here to save you, I’m here to forgive you, I’m here to accept you. So let’s look at this image of the gospel because I think it’s really a beautiful way to imagine how we have to be careful in our way of listening so that we don’t end up in judgment and we don’t end up in separation and isolation. But the image is there’s something that we’re supposed to do if we’re involved in this work of being authentic and integrated, and that is some self reflection. You can’t grow unless you take time to understand your story, your background, who you came from, those early years that formed you so intensely.

In terms of things that are what I would call your default. We, we respond to situations because of the way we were trained to respond in the family of origin we have. And then we grow up in a city, in a certain place, we have certain relationships. Some of those are very positive, some of those can be negative. We can engage ourselves in people that are life giving and unfortunately, we can be the victim of people who suck life out of us. You have to pay attention to all of that in order to understand who you are.

And why is that so important? Because when Jesus is talking to his disciples, he’s putting on a therapist hat, as I said earlier. And it seems like what he’s saying is, look, unless you look at your own stuff, unless you have self examined your life and you recognize there are things in you that are there because of the negative things that have happened to you or the patterns in which you’ve grown up, unless you can realize that there are things that block your ability to see and to hear and to connect with people, unless you know that and face those things, you’re going to do the most classic things that all of us do. When you have a really irrational response to somebody’s let’s say imperfection or maybe their self centeredness or whatever it is that they’re proclaiming without even realizing it in their speech. And you begin to see it and feel it. You know, if you’re filled with judgment and it’s a rational, intense judgment against them, guaranteed, that thing that you can’t stand in them is the very thing, it’s the beam in your eyes, the thing you have not looked at.

What a real tragedy it is to be caught in that kind of system where your reactions to other people are based on some kind of repressed understanding that you’re supposed to have of your own faults. So isn’t it interesting that the only way you can begin this wonderful work of connecting with people through the way we speak, through what we say, if you’re filled with judgment about those things, you’re not going to get very far in terms of learning about both who you are and who the other person is. And you know, there’s something about your heart, this thing, the middle of your chest, that is filled with divinity, clothed with divinity. And it’s there that you’re going to find your intention. The intention that you have in a relationship with a human being. Is it to evaluate them, judge them, become better than they are, or evaluate whether they’re better than you are, whatever you’re going to be in that game.

Or you can get free of that and enter into relationships with people. And we do it by listening attentively. And when we listen with attention and curiosity and wonder about who they are and maybe what they’ve been through in their life and we’re not filled with judgment, there’s this wonderful feeling of oneness, unity, connection. You know, that’s what we long for the most. You know, when I think about it, the pandemic has been such an interesting experience. But I know that I can be in a funk for a couple of days when I’m by myself and I pick up the phone and I talk to somebody and all of a sudden I feel this energy come and flowing into me and maybe it’s flowing back to them, I hope.

And, and there’s that dynamic that is where grace operates in communion with another person. So you can feel why Paul is saying what he’s saying and also Jesus what he’s saying. He’s trying to get people attentive to the way in which we communicate. And if we understand that the heart where God dwells is interested in reaching into the heart where someone else dwells and wants to give them some kind of wisdom, and insight into who they are. How we listen is amazingly effective because we listen without judgment, with curiosity, and maybe even then sometimes with sadness or kind of, I don’t know, longing that they shouldn’t have gone through what they went through that caused this problem in them that makes them so judgmental or makes them so bitter or makes them so negative. And if you have this compassionate thing moving between you in conversations, then those conversations aren’t just information passing back and forth, but it’s grace, this mysterious thing we’re clothed in that is different than our corrupt nature.

It is filled with incorruptibility. It is filled with a energy that enters into another person and gives them some kind of hope. Even though you haven’t corrected them, haven’t told them that they’re, you know, they’re overly judgmental. Because sometimes if you attack someone for their weaknesses and they’re not willing to look at their weaknesses, you’ve only made those weaknesses stronger in them because they feel like they’ve been attacked. And their self centered ego, part of them says, no, no, I’m not going to let you attack me. I will prove that to you, that I am who I am and I’m going to stay with who I am because that’s who I am.

Blah, blah, blah. Defensiveness. God, to be free of anything that separates us from another human being is a grace that I long for. And I know you long for it deep inside of you. Because the heart that God has created in us, that has been given whole and complete, that has been perhaps damaged in our past, still longs for this kind of integrity and authenticity. I want to be a source of life to the person sitting across from me.

I don’t have to think about that all the time. I just have it as a fundamental intention. I want to be with people and somehow because I’m with them, I want to receive something from them and I want to give them something that’s the work of the Lord. And it’s not about preaching Jesus, it’s not about quoting scripture, it’s not about, certainly not about correcting and judging another person. But it’s all about paying attention to the intention that’s in your heart. I want to be connected.

I’d like to be a part of who you are. It may be in a 10 second, 20 second, you know, interchange between two people and it may be in a lifetime of spending time together, but the intention’s the same. And when you’re dealing with the work of the Lord, you know what? It doesn’t have anything to do with quantity or even unnecessarily quality. It’s just that if it’s his work and it’s coming through you, you’ll know that it’s going to bring life. Amen.

A Closing Prayer Father, we strive always to please you in what we do and how we act, how we speak. So let us always trust, most especially in your ability to give us everything that we need to go beyond our human nature, to go beyond our brokenness and backgrounds that keep us perhaps from being fully authentic. We trust in you. We open our heart to you. We ask you to fill us with you. We have every confidence in the world that we can be exactly the person you intend us to be.

And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. I’d like to remind you that the program you just listened to is available on our website pastreflectionsinstitute.com as well as on our podcast. Go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast and subscribe to Finding God in Ourselves. It’s free to listen to anywhere, anytime and the music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. This ministry also needs your support, so make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website.

Thank you so much for your support, listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Father Don Fisher, Catholic Priest of the Diocese of Dallas, is a production of the Pastoral reflections institute. Copyright 2022.