In Luke 11:29, a clearly exasperated Jesus says that this is “an evil generation”. Another translation uses the term, “evil age”, and it was likely a challenging time for the Jewish community in first century Palestine under Roman rule. Throughout this year, I have often felt the same way, with the sufferings caused by the pandemic, signs of continuing racial injustice, political strife, fires, and more bad news dominating our headlines and my own interior life. I understand the desire to find some meaning in this continuing flow of hard times.

St. Ignatius suggests we pay particular attention to these interior movements or reactions as the possible “signs” that Jesus said the people were looking for.  Then, and now, this is the sacred space where God is at work in our lives, accompanying us, consoling us and inviting us to consider how to experience the “greater” presence in our lives that Jesus was calling his listeners to encounter as well. Something greater is in fact a part of our present reality if we can exercise our noticing and reflection muscles a little more often.

In his wonderful book, Tattoos on the Heart, which illustrates themes of the Spiritual Exercises in the life of Homeboy Industries, Fr. Greg Boyle talks about “the slow work of God” as we fumble in the dark for “grace and flashlights.” Where is your flashlight pointing today?

SOURCE:    Tom Reynolds, www.jesuitprayer.org
 
 
Blessed Carlo Acutis (3 May 1991 – 12 October 2006) was an Italian Catholic computer programmer.  He was best known for documenting Eucharistic miracles around the world and cataloguing them all onto a website that he created in the months before his death from leukemia. He was noted for his cheerfulness and his computer skills as well as for his deep devotion to the Eucharist which became a core theme of his life.

He was beatified just a few days ago on October 10 in the in the Italian town of Assisi, during Mass celebrated by Cardinal Agostino Vallini.

Pope Francis recalled the 15-year-old Italian teenager as “a young man in love with the Eucharist.. .. . he did not rest in comfortable immobility,” said the Pope. “He grasped the needs of his time, because he saw the face of Christ in the weakest.” Blessed Carlo Acutis’ example, he added, shows young people that “true happiness is found in putting God in the first place and serving Him in our brothers and sisters.”

SOURCE:   Devin Watkins, www.vatican.va

 
Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are not an “accident” -  but a divine choice.  It is important to realize how often we have had chances to be grateful and have not used them.  When someone is kind to us, when an event turns out well, when a problem is solved, a relationship restored, a wound healed, there are very concrete reasons to offer thanks: be it with words, with flowers, with a letter, a card, a phone call, or just a gesture of affection . . . Every time we decide to be grateful it will be easier to see new things to be grateful for.  Gratitude begets gratitude, just as love begets love.

SOURCE:   Henri J. M. Nowen, Life of the Beloved