O God, Who show the light of Your
truth to those who go astray, so that they may return to the right
path, give all who for the faith they profess are accounted
Christians the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of
Christ and to strive after all that does it honor. Through our Lord
Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of
the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
show the light of Your truth
– Pontius Pilate once
asked, cynically, “What is truth?” Jesus has the answer: “I am
the way, the truth, and the life.” When
we ask God to show us the light of His truth, we are asking Him to
show us Jesus, Who is revealed in Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition,
the sacraments, the Magisterium, and our own open hearts and minds.
We are asking God to help us see and grasp a reality that
is far beyond the material world. In fact, the spiritual depths of
that reality are far beyond our human minds. Yet God illuminates us
with the light of His truth, with the light of Jesus, and
if we let it, that light will penetrate our hearts and minds and draw
us ever closer to the Blessed Trinity.
those who go astray –
At one point or other, these words can apply to all of us. We go
astray by sin, and we need God's truth to help us repent and assure
us that He is standing ready to forgive us. We go astray by neglect,
and we need God's truth to inspire us to enter more deeply into
faith, hope, and love. We go astray by error, and we need God's
truth to convince us that we are wrong and show us what is right.
the right path
– This is the path straight
to God, the path straight to Heaven, to face-to-face intimacy with
our Lord for eternity. It is also the narrow way that Jesus speaks
of, the way that we discover through God's gifts of faith, hope,
love, and truth.
the faith they profess
– We are Christians because
we profess our faith in Christ. What is faith? The Catechism tells
us that faith is both a human act in which “the human
intellect and will co-operate with divine grace” (#155) and a
theological virtue, a divine gift, “by which we believe in God and
believe all that He has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church
proposes for our belief, because He is truth itself” (#1814). If
God didn't give us the gift of faith, we would not be able to
believe, but we have to accept and exercise that gift for our faith
to grow and flourish.
the grace to reject whatever is
contrary to the name of Christ –
We pray that God will
give us the grace to say a firm “no” to anything that is contrary
to Christ. Remember that, in Scripture, a
name refers to the character of the one who bears it, so the name of
Christ refers to Who He is, all of His traits and attributes. We
need God's help to conform ourselves to Christ, to become more and
more like Him, and to reject whatever might lead us away.
to strive after all that does it
honor – How do we honor God?
St. Irenaeus once wrote that “the glory of God is man fully alive.”
We honor God, we give Him glory, when we strive to become fully
alive, and we become fully alive only when we live in Him, when we
give Him all that we have and all that we are.
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