October 26, 2015 Monday
30th Week
in Ordinary Time
1st reading:
Romans 8.11-17
Gospel: Luke 13:10-17
Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath and a crippled woman was there. An evil spirit had kept her bent for eighteen years so that she could not straighten up at all. On seeing her, Jesus called her and said, “Woman, you are freed from your infirmity.” Then he laid his hands upon her and immediately she was made straight and praised God.But the ruler of the synagogue was indignant because Jesus had performed this healing on the Sabbath day and he said to the people, “There are six days in which to work; come on those days to be healed and not on the Sabbath.”
But the Lord replied, “You hypocrites! Everyone of you unties his ox or his donkey on the Sabbath and leads it out of the barn to give it water. And here you have a daughter of Abraham whom Satan had bound for eighteen years. Should she not be freed from her bonds on the Sabbath?”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Andy Serkis the British actor who played the bulging-eyed schizophrenic cave dweller Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” said that he studied his cats to develop his character’s sinister throaty voice. The success of the Gollum character is in its ability to project the condition of being addict and desperate. In an interview Serkis said: “I used to drink a lot of (…) honey and lemon and ginger and fruit teas. I had a lot of lower back injuries because of the decision to make him crawl because he is an addict and I wanted to reflect that sense of desperation”.
The Gollum character wouldn’t have been difficult to create had the internal condition of despair been real in Serkis. Psychology tells us that one’s moral condition can affect the body. Consider the condition of the woman described by Luke as kept bent for 18 years by an evil spirit. The same spirit must have alienated her from the community, for that is the basic effect of sin. Probably she learned to stoop down to avoid the questioning eyes of the community.
The name “Satan” attributed to the prince of devils means a stumbling block. Jesus had used this term on Peter who tried to dissuade Him from undergoing the Passion. This title is now exclusive to the prince of devils whose raison d’être is to block people from the path that leads to God.
Serkis was successful in becoming the Gollum movie lovers well remember because of how creative he was in projecting this movie character from a fake inner condition. If we let Satan into our souls, would he be less creative than Serkis in recreating us? – Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com. Website: www.frdan.org.
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