09/08/2024

Today we can join our prayers with those of Edith Stein and all other victims of European self-centredness which has produced, under the guidance of the Catholic Church, so much evil throughout History.

The Church has always been part of the Empires and Kingdoms that are the inglorious part of human history since the time Peter followed Paul to the Rome  from whose centre all roads led to the very limits of its Empire.

We the individuals, living in today's instant communication with the whole of humanity, have become as it were little empires for which the whole world can be ours at the touch of a keyboard.

St Benedicta was aware that she was blessed by God with a great intellect which she accepted with humility and accepted the Faith based on the Resurrection of Jesus, a Jew like she, a chosen one of God.

She was a Jew so the then prominent "Kingdom of this World" pursued her until she could be eliminated by their preferred method of bolstering their egos. The Nazi factories of death had all been built by men whose culture was the product of 2000 years of Christianity.

Our God knows everything. I am a puny little creature wordless in the face of the mystery that is the impossible to understand passivity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the face of so much evil that continues today.

I know that my God knows me and that it is only in this life that I can know, love and serve Him to keep my being free from the sin that is the reason for the imponderable suffering of Son on the cross. 

We are all humans, we are all guilty of sin, so why, O Lord do so many of us have to suffer in the way that millions of us have during my lifetime and others like myself remain in a quiet peace that is painless comfort but can also lead to the sinful self-centredness that brings about the loss of our souls?

Dear Lord, help me to remain  humbly on my knees and not be overcome by my self-perceived "cleverness". Nobody can challenge you but it seems to me that the slaughter of the Jews by Hitler should have been prevented. It is too much to ask my tiny mortal brain to adjust to your eternity that has no time, no beginning and no end especially when I see slaughter and assassination as the way in which modern Jews maintain their hold on land they have stolen from Palestinians. Today's Gospel makes it clear that each of our own virgin souls are responsible for our own spiritual "oil" and that we will not be able to join St Benedicta, Our Mother Mary and all the Saints in our place at your "Wedding Feast" if we do not  preserve that "oil" that is your free, but not painless, gift of merciful forgiveness.