16th Sunday after Pentecost

With our recent focus on New Beginnings, we arrive at the 16th Sunday after Pentecost. 

Pentecost was one of the greatest of New Beginnings. With the decent of the Holy Spirit upon Our Blessed Mother, the Apostles, and various other early followers of Christ, the incredible impetus to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ and His Holy Church began in earnest. It has continued without pause for two millennia.

Today, we'll meditate on some inspiring words from the pen of Father Gerald Vann, O.P. And we'll continue with Father Vann's thoughts for the next few Sunday's. Each post will build on the previous. 

If you've read our series in recent weeks about the potential for "trouble" beginning in September, this particular passage kicks off in a most appropriate manner.

“Though I should walk in the valley of darkness, says the Psalmist, yet will I fear no evil: for Thou art with me. If we want to be holy – and happy – we have to learn to love God enough to make our will identical with His, so that when we say, Thy will be done, we really mean it, not only about this and that but about everything. We need therefore a strong sense of God’s providence, and a deep love of God’s providence. What does it mean, to love God’s providence? It does not mean, in the first place, the fatalism that makes no efforts. On the contrary, the efforts that we can make are part of God’s plan; events do depend on our free-will. Nor does it mean that purely natural placidity of temperament that some people enjoy, so that nothing seems able to ruffle their composure. Nor again is it a merely passive resignation, as the word is often understood: a reluctant admission that what can’t be cured must be endured. No: the Lord is our Shepherd; He is with us. And we are to have faith and trust that His plan is a loving plan: that though things are very black, His wisdom and love and power are there to save and to heal, to bring good out of the evil. You know how a little boy, helping his father with a job of carpentry, will concentrate on some little thing that his father gives him to do, not seeing how the finished work will emerge from these preliminaries, but content, trusting implicitly that the job will be finished, and will be successful. We should do the same with our lives and all the things that make up our lives: God gives us this little bit of His work to do for Him, and we ought to have the child’s trust that His skill and His love will see the work through, and concentrate on our own minute share in it, in doing that well. So we should be saved from that solicitude against which our Lord warns us. He does not tell us that we must not work, must not plan ahead; He does not tell us that everything will be done for us; of course not. But He does tell us that we must not be always worrying and fretting and making a great commotion, as though we and not He were responsible for the universe.” (Father Gerald Vann, O.P.)

This post was written prior to September. I have not idea whether the troubles for which we advised preparation have begun. Maybe, as we did note, the can has been kicked down the road for the umpteenth time. Maybe not. Either way, Father Vann's words will hep us.

But no matter what's actually occurred to date, you may agree that troubles are never far from our door. And in trouble and sorrow, just as much as during good times in our lives, God must remain at the center of our thoughts, words, and deeds every day of our lives. 

He is with us. And it behooves us to always be with Him, not matter what the world, the flesh, and the devil hurls at us.

Happy Sunday!