Minute Meditations: Exodus 4

Moses is standing in the presence of God, Who is speaking to him out of the burning bush that is not consumed by the divine fire. He has heard God pronounce the Divine Name. He has seen his own staff turn into a snake and back into a staff. He has witnessed God change his hand to the hand of a leper and back again. God has told Moses that he is to go to the Pharaoh and speak as God's representative that God may bring the people of Israel out of Egypt and settle them in the Promised Land.

After all this, Moses stands there before God and whines that he isn't a good speaker. He is far from eloquent, he tells God, in fact he is “slow of speech and slow of tongue.” God assures Moses that He can handle the problem. After all, God is the One Who makes the deaf hear and the blind see and the dumb talk. He can take care of Moses. We would think that Moses would be comforted and strengthened by God's assurances and by the miracles he has just seen.

But the next words out of Moses mouth are “O my Lord, please send someone else!” Isn't that so very human? Moses is scared and insecure. He doesn't want to step out of his comfort zone. He doesn't want this mission. He can do without the honor. He just wants to be left alone to hide.

If God had been incarnate at that moment, He probably would have rolled His eyes and shaken His head at Moses. But He doesn't give up on Moses. Instead, He eliminates Moses' last excuse. Moses' brother, Aaron, speaks fluently and well, and when God tells Moses what to say, Moses will, in turn, tell Aaron. Aaron will serve as the mouthpiece. Moses is out of excuses, and he sets out on his mission.

Minute Meditations: Psalm 50

In this psalm, God summons His people to stand before Him that He may judge them. They have made a covenant with Him, but they have broken it, and now God takes them to task for the lack of correspondence between their external practices of worship and the rest of their lives.

God admits that He does not rebuke the people for the number of their sacrifices. They're good at going through the motions, and they do so frequently. Their burnt offerings are always before God. But God won't accept any of them, for the people are not offering them in the right spirit. They seem to think that God might be hungry and that they are giving Him something He needs (as with the pagan “gods”). God puts an end to this notion. If He were hungry (which He isn't), He certainly wouldn't tell them. He owns everything and could simply take what He wanted. What's more, the people seem to think that they can buy God's favor by doing their external rituals exactly right. Apparently, they know very little about God and what He really wants.

So God tells them what He really wants. He wants His people to bring their voluntary sacrifices to Him out of love. He wants their gratitude. He wants them to keep the vows they have made to Him, i.e., the covenant. He wants them to stop merely reciting His laws and actually start living them. He wants them to stop speaking evil and telling lies. He wants them to be generous and loving with one another. He wants them to stop being hypocrites.

Minute Meditations: 1 Kings 19

Elijah is at the very end of his proverbial rope. He has just defeated (with God's help, of course) all of the prophets of Baal, and for good measure, he slit their throats. But now Queen Jezebel (whose pet prophets are all dead) is out to get Elijah. Elijah decides to get out of her way...and fast.

The prophet goes a day's journey into the wilderness and decides that he has had enough. He sits down under a broom tree and has a little talk with God. “It is enough,” he tells Him; “now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Elijah is tired and discouraged, and he doesn't know what to do next. In fact, he would rather not do anything at all. He is quite content, he thinks, to sit there and die. He lies down and goes to sleep.

God, however, does not take Elijah's life. In fact, He completely ignores that request. An angel tells Elijah to get up and eat and drink. God is sending him on a journey. Elijah obeys, eating the cake and drinking from the jug of water that have miraculously appeared. Neither the miracle nor the food phase him all that much, though, and he merely lies back down, still discouraged and unwilling to move. The angel pokes Elijah a second time, telling him again to eat and drink because the journey will be too hard for him otherwise.

This time Elijah finally moves. He eats and drinks and finds himself so much strengthened by the simple yet miraculous food that he can walk for forty days all the way to Mount Horeb, where he will have an important meeting with God.

So whenever we're feeling discouraged, down-in-the-dumps, and sluggish, we should remember that we are in good company. Even the great Elijah had his moments. But Elijah got up (eventually), ate, and obeyed God. We, too, must get up out of our slump, eat and drink (God has given us an even more miraculous food than that which appeared to Elijah – the Eucharist!), and go on about fulfilling God's will.

Minute Meditations: Tobit 1

By the time we meet Tobit in the first chapter of the book that bears his name, he has long been in exile in Nineveh, carried away from Israel when the Assyrians captured the Northern Kingdom and resettled the Israelites in Nineveh and other cities in their domain.

Tobit, however, looks back to his days as a young Israelite in the lands of his tribe of Naphtali. Even when everybody else was going to worship at the shrine of the calf that King Jeroboam set up, Tobit would not. He continued to go and worship in Jerusalem as God had commanded. He brought his first fruits and paid the proper tithes. Even though he was the only one of his tribe (or even the only one in the Northern Kingdom) to go to Jerusalem, Tobit did it anyway because it was the right thing to do. He was determined to follow God's will.

It takes courage to go against the crowd. It takes courage to be the only one to stand up for what is right. It takes courage to show one's stance by one's actions and to continue to do that against the opposition of everyone else. Tobit had that courage. He chose God over human beings, and he invites us to do the same.

A Note on the Collect Series

Thank you for reading my series on the weekly Collect prayers. I have now written a full year's set of these reflections. To begin the series again with the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time, please refer to the post made on July 5, 2020.

Please watch for a new series about praying with poetry coming soon!

The Collect for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

O God, Who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.

the grace of adoption – When we were baptized, we entered into God's covenant family. We became His sons and daughters by adoption. Jesus is God's only-begotten Son, but we are given a share in Jesus' own sonship and become sons and daughters in the Son, heirs in the Heir, sharers in the divine life, and members of the divine family.

children of light – Are we children of light? Do we let God's light shine through us? Do we seek to become transparent like the Blessed Virgin Mary who magnifies the Lord? Or do we allow ourselves to give in to the darkness of the world around us? Do we let it darken our minds and hearts? Do we let it take over our lives?

grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error – This world presents so many errors as though they were great truths. We are so often told what to think and what to believe by people who are clearly trying to manipulate us for their own purposes. When we give in and accept the errors, we allow the darkness to overshadow us and to sneak into our minds and hearts. Our thoughts become warped and degraded, and we often forget how to think properly at all. We allow others to control us rather than seeking the truth and the light.

always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth – Jesus says, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” He also says, “I am the Light of the World.” When we stand in the bright light of truth, then, we stand in Jesus. In Him we find the truth. In Him we are filled with light and life and peace. In Him we must stand and allow Him to shine through us to those still wrapped in darkness. We must stand as a lamp on a table or a city on a hill and let His light and His truth pour through us to a world that desperately needs that light and truth.

The Collect for the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Grant, O Lord, that we may always revere and love Your holy name, for You never deprive of Your guidance those You set firm on the foundation of Your love. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.

we may always revere and love Your holy name – In the Bible, a name refers to the one's character, personality, and even person. It is much more than a mere word used arbitrarily to identify someone. So God's name, then, stands for Who He is. When we revere and love God's holy name, we revere and love Him. And we must pray for the grace that will help our reverence deepen and our love broaden, for we can never revere and love God too much.

You never deprive of Your guidance – God guides us always. He nudges us and inspires us. He reveals His will in many different ways. He teaches us through Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. He pokes our consciences. God is always speaking to us in one way or another. But do we listen? Do we recognize His voice? Do we notice His messages? Do we follow His guidance? Or do we go our own way?

those You set firm on the foundation of Your love – Take a few minutes today to reflect on God's love and how it serves as the foundation of our lives, our faith, and our own love. God has set us firm in His love. We cannot lose it. God will always love us infinitely more than we can imagine. Yet we can fail to accept and return that love or to spread that love to others. May we always embrace God's love and make it the foundation of our entire existence.