Friday, August 11, 2017
18th Week in Ordinary Time
1st Reading: Dt 4:32-40
Gospel:
Matthew 16:24-28
Jesus said to his disciples, “If you want to follow me, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. For whoever chooses to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for my sake will find it. What will one gain by winning the whole world if he destroys himself? There is nothing you can give to recover your own self.
“Know that the Son of Man will come in the Glory of his Father with the holy angels, and he will reward each one according to his deeds. Truly, I tell you, there are some here who will not die before they see the Son of Man coming as king.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Two nuns are traveling through Europe by car. They get to Transylvania and have to stop as traffic light goes red. Suddenly, a little Dracula jumps onto the hood of the car and hisses through the windshield.
The nun driving asks, “What shall we do?” The other nun replies, “Turn the windshield wipers on. That will get rid of the abomination”. The driver switches them on, knocking Dracula about, but he clings on and continues hissing at the nuns. “What shall I do now?” the driver nun shouts. “Switch on the windshield washer. I filled it up with Holy Water at the Vatican,” says the other nun. The driver turns on the windshield washer. Dracula screams as the water burns his skin, but he clings on.
“Now what?” the driver shouts. “Show him your cross,” says the other nun. She opens the window and shouts obscene words to Dracula. (End of the story).
Shutting the mouth up instead of spewing bad words is almost next to impossible when the habit has become deeply ingrained in the person. This play of words is instructive: HABIT is hard to remove.
Even if you remove “h”, you still have “a bit”. When you remove “H” and “A” you still have a “bit”. Even if you remove “H”, “A”, and “B”, you will still have “it”.
Are you carrying a similar cross? Learn from today’s Gospel reading where Jesus says, “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” Carrying the cross must be preceded by self-denial. The struggle of conquering the habit of saying bad words won’t be as unbearable because with self-denial one develops stronger willpower to resist the habit. Ascetics have elevated this strategy to the level of spirituality.
They call this “agere contra” – the art of saying no to anything that the self wants. This is easier said than done, and it could even be bloody since one’s formidable enemy is really the self. But the blood would be the kind that drives Dracula away. –(Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM.
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