Greetings to you all. Hopefully your week was filled with God and His Grace. At the beginning of my reflection for this weekend I’d like to ask: have you ever heard about a canned heart? A canned heart is a closed heart where no one goes in and no love goes out. It doesn’t get hurt. It is a well–preserved heart with lots of preservatives! Inside a canned heart, there are no turbulences, no crises, no life and no love.
How many people’s hearts today are canned? Even within our Catholic Church today! I think about everyone: the leaders of the church, priests, religious, and about us. How often are our hearts canned?!
How do I know if my heart may be canned? When we hold back our heart before God. When we hold back our heart our love from others. When we are filled with hatred, guilt, hurts, pride and other filth. What we need is a can opener –to open our heart. Only Jesus is the can opener of all hearts. The only thing that we should do is to allow Him to open your heart.
We can apply this Gospel reading very easily to our life. It says to us that we must not identify our religion or being religious by just performing external acts like: going to church on Sundays, attending Mass, saying prayers, reading the Bible or giving to charity, because these do not guarantee us holiness. What is most important is the love in our hearts that motivates us to do what we do. We go to Mass and we pray to God because we love Him so much. We give our charity to those in need, because we love them. If our hearts are filled with bitterness and pride, then all these external acts won’t make us holy before God and enter His Kingdom.
If our heart is clean, if our heart is not divided, if our heart is not canned, a lot of unclean things may enter us and not soil us because the heart does not accept them. If our heart is clean we may have seen something very obscene; we may have been exposed to a lot of corruption; we may have heard a lot of gossip; we may have heard about physical or mental abuse, as Catholics today we may have been the object of hatred.
These occasions may disturb us and arouse strong feelings or temptations in us. As long as we do not accept them or consent to them in our heart, they have no power over us, they do not defile us, but they may provoke us to show everyone through our own actions what is the true image of LOVE, what is the true image of our God who is LOVE!
What is in your heart today? Where is my heart? Let’s pray today that God gives us an open heart and the grace to honor Him not only with our lips, but especially with our hearts!
Prayer Basket….coming up!
How many intentions do we bring to Jesus when we come to church? A lot…. our hearts are always filled with worship, praise, supplication, petition or intercession, or gratitude. We bring all of those intentions believing that God will hear and listen to our prayers and give us what we need.
Next weekend you’ll have an opportunity to write your intentions on a paper and place them in the Prayer Basket. The Basket will be displayed by the picture of Merciful Jesus, close to the Memorial Board, by the back wall. Over the weekend, at each Mass, the prayer basket will be brought to the altar during the offertory procession. Each Monday evening the Intercessory Prayer Team will pray for and over these intentions. On Fridays we’ll place these prayers in the front of the Blessed sacrament during adoration.
I encourage you to bring your prayers, intentions, bring all of these people for whom you pray for regularly, pray for those who have asked you for your prayers, for our country, our world, for every intention of your heart and place them in the Prayer Basket.
I truly believe that this form of devotion will help us be more open, more specific, precise, and more trustful, but also knowing that other people will be praying for my intentions would bring more hope and peace in our hearts. Don’t be afraid, bring your intentions before Jesus and just have FAITH.
Fr. Tom