July/August 2025: Thought for the Day
Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
6 July 2025
Henri Amyl, a Swiss philosopher, wrote about the importance of simplicity:
‘All of us are generally bound up with hindrances and duties that wind about us like a spider’s web that restricts our movements. In order to simplify our duties and our lives we must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is entrapped.
It is a lack of order that makes us slaves.’
Pope John XXIII once said, ‘I must strip my views of all useless foliage and concentrate on what is truth, justice and charity.’
Blessingtonparish.ie
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Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
13 July 2025
God has compassion on us. In the gestures and deeds of the Good Samaritan we recognise the merciful acts of God in all of salvation history. It is the same compassion with which the Lord comes to meet each one of us: He does not ignore us, he knows our pain, he knows how much we need help and comfort. He comes close and never abandons us. Each of us, ask and answer the question in our heart: ‘Do I believe? Do I believe that the Lord has compassion on me, just as I am, a sinner, with many problems and many issues?’ Think about that and the answer is: ‘Yes!’
The late Pope Francis
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Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
20 July 2025
Do we ever labor at serving
Till voices grow fretful and shrill,
Forgetting how to be loving,
Forgetting how to be still?
Do we strive for ‘things’ in possession,
And toil for the perishing meat,
Neglecting the one thing needful –
Sitting at Jesus’ feet?
Service is good when he asks it,
Labor is right in its place,
But there is one thing better,
Looking up in his face;
There is so much he can tell us,
Truths that are precious and deep;
This is the place where he wants us,
These are the things we can keep.
Annie Johnson Flint from her poem ‘Martha and Mary’
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Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
27 July 2025 • World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly
Grandparents hold our hands for just a little while, but our hearts forever.
Anon
‘Grandparents can be very special resources. Just being close to them reassures a child, without words, about change and continuity, about what went before and what will come after.’
Fred Rogers
‘Because [grandparents] are usually free to love and guide and befriend the young without having to take daily responsibility for them, they can often reach out past pride and fear of failure and close the space between generations.’
President Jimmy Carter
An hour with your grandchildren can make you feel young again. Anything longer than that, and you start to age quickly.’
Gene Perret
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Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
3 August 2025
Earthly riches are like the reed. Its roots are sunk in the swamp, and its exterior is fair to behold; but inside it is hollow. If a man leans on such a reed, it will snap off and pierce his soul.
St Anthony of Padua
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
Epictetus
Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.
P.T. Barnum
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Anonymous
It is health that is the real wealth, and not pieces of gold and silver.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
10 August 2025
‘To be hospitable we have to get out of ourselves and become interested in the other.’ (Gula)
Often our lack of hospitality is simply the failure to notice and acknowledge others and their needs – the needs of the larger world and the needs of those closest to us. Jesus models that attentiveness. He noticed the sick, the excluded, the hungry, those that others passed by. God continues to be attentive. As we contemplate the ministry of Jesus, we are called to heighten our awareness of others so that we can carry on the ministry of Jesus.
Gerald M. Fagin SJ
Putting on the Heart of Christ