“SPRINGS OF LIVING WATER”
Daily Spiritual Reflections
1st October 2021
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FRIDAY, TWENTY SIXTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
Feast of St Therese of Child Jesus, Virgin & Doctor
Is 66:10-14; Ps 131:1-3; Mt 18:1-5
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OUR ‘LITTLENESS’ REVEALS GOD’S GREATNESS
We like to be teachers rather than students; We like to be bosses rather than workers; We like to be independent rather than be dependent; We dissent authority, yet want others to obey us. In simple words, we like to lord over others. This is a general tendency in man. And yet, the life and teachings of the Lord were diametrically contrary. He left his heavenly throne and came to live among us; he kept aside his divine nature and embraced our lowly human nature, even to the point of washing his own disciples’ feet and later offering himself on the cross as a ransom for us. That is why God raised him above everything (cf. Phil 2:6-13).
Today we celebrate the feast of St Therese of the Child Jesus, popularly known as “The Little Flower”. When others rejoiced in their greatness, she rejoiced in her littleness. She hid from the glamour of the world in a cloistered convent, for she knew the path shown by the Divine Master to be truly great. For Therese, “littleness” did not refer to the littleness of the acts we are doing, like laundry, cutting vegetables, or even giving a simple smile to someone unpleasant. For her littleness was our poverty before God. Before God, we are little. To accept and act out of that constitutes humility. In her “little way”, we do small acts of charity for others, not out of our strength and the virtue we feel at that moment, but rather out of poverty, powerlessness and emptiness that allows God’s grace to work through us, so in doing what we’re doing, we’re drawing others to God and not to ourselves.
In our littleness, we can change the world more humbly, by sowing a hidden seed, by being a hidden antibiotic of love inside the soul of humanity. In this we become instruments revealing the greatness of God in the world. May St Therese pray for us, that we might bring about the goodness and greatness of God by the littleness of our lives and actions.
Response: Keep my soul in peace at your side, O Lord.
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