August 29, 2010
22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
On Thursday the Catholic League gathered at the Empire State building to protest the owner’s refusal to light the building in blue and white on the 100 anniversary of the birth of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. My guess is that Mother Teresa would be smiling. She acknowledged becoming a sort of celebrity was a most difficult cross to bear. She would have preferred anonymity. For her the only light that matters is the light of Christ. Saturday, August 28, is the feast of St. Augustine. He writes in his Confessions as if speaking to God (and to us): “Urged to reflect upon myself, I entered under your guidance into the inmost depth of my soul. I was able to do so because you were my helper. On entering into myself I saw, as it were with the eye of the soul, what was beyond the eye of the soul, beyond my spirit; your immutable light. It was not the ordinary light perceptible to all flesh, nor was it merely something of greater magnitude but still essentially akin, shining more clearly and diffusing itself everywhere by its intensity. No, it was something entirely distinct, something altogether different from all these things; and it did not rest above my mind as oil on the surface of water, nor was it above me as heaven is above the earth. This light was above me because it had made me; I was below it because I was created by it. He who has come to know the truth knows this light.†In humility Mother Teresa says that she is a pencil in God’s hand. Her vocation, e.g. “a call within a call,†was to serve Jesus disguised in the poor. In our Gospel today Jesus tells his host and fellow guests at dinner that when they have a banquet, they should invite those who are most often not invited. Mother Teresa took Jesus’ words to heart and lived them. The light of Christ, shining in and through this remarkable woman of prayer and charity, renders the artificial light that on occasion illuminates the Empire State building as no light at all.
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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
