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Azariah’s prayer is appropriate for us to recall in our season of Lenten repentance. We have no right to God’s care. We can only ask for God’s mercy.
We often find it difficult to recognize the true prophets in our midst. We dismiss them as crackpots and extremists because they make us uncomfortable.
God’s mercy is offered to us because God is God. We are members of a sinful people. Yet God cares for us anyhow.
Francis was not the first saint to have encountered God during an illness. There’s something about serious illness that forces us to confront our mortality and then to question our priorities.
How dramatic and alluring is Micah’s statement that “God, who delights in clemency, and will again have compassion on us.
Those who worry about whether there will be enough find it difficult to give freely. Those accustomed to giving it all away find it easier to accept God’s grace.
In the Book of Micah the author first prays for the prosperity of the people. Then in a kind of litany of forgiveness, he speaks of the blessings that God offers to them.
In spite of his radical commitment to live the Gospel, apart from many of the cultural institutions that had influenced the Church by the thirteenth century, Francis still remained a faithful, obedient son of the Church.
The suffering of the just man is a theme that calls for our greater attention as we approach the weeks of the liturgy that deal with the sufferings and death of the just man, Jesus.
What I love is that Psalm 139 takes us all the way back to when we first became. It reveres the beauty of our very beginnings and returns us to the miracle of our mothers.
