June 2024: Thought for the Day
Thought for the Day
The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)
2 June 2024
The sense of meal is what makes a family house a home. It is a place of loving encounters that deepens family and friendship ties. Hence, at meals bellies are not just being filled, at meals memories, laughters and joys are shared. It is a profound gesture of togetherness, harmony and peace as the meal is never shared with a perceived enemy without reconciliation first. This is my African sense of meal. The Eucharistic meal in the same way is a Peace meal of reconciliation with God and our brothers and sisters. It is a meal of God’s family, where the Church is the home of sharing for all.
Michael Onuh Ogwuche
Director of Formation, Spiritan Postulancy
* * *
Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
9 June 2024
Having moved recently into grandmother mode I’m out of step with the parents of children sitting exams in the month of June. One June I watched an elegant grandmother sitting in a café, waiting for her granddaughters. They arrived wearing green school uniforms and looks of exam weariness. She stood up and enfolded them in large hugs and ordered hot chocolates with marshmallows on top.
We can do very little as parents as grandparents: we can’t live their lives for them: we can’t sit their exams; we can’t expect them to be like us; all that matters is for them to be themselves and to like themselves. But we can offer hot chocolate and hugs, and sometimes that’s enough.
Anne Thurston
Small Wonders (Veritas Publications)
* * *
Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
16 June 2024 • Day for Life
‘All life has inestimable value even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor, are masterpieces of God’s creation, made in his own image, destined to live forever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect.’
Pope Francis
‘As believers, how can we fail to see that abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide are a terrible rejection of God’s gift of life and love? And as believers, how can we fail to feel the duty to surround the sick and those in distress with the warmth of our affection and the support that will help them always to embrace life?’
St Pope John Paul II
* * *
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
23 June 2024
Christ the Friend James: He was in our boat. He was with us when we encountered a storm. He came to our rescue when we had nowhere else to turn… How often I remembered this experience in the years that followed. It always spoke to me so powerfully – and it always made such an impression on people who were hearing about the Lord for the first time! It was an image for me of the life of every Christian. Christ is always with each one of us, and he has the power to protect us from every evil, to bring us safely through the most trying of times.
www.catholicexchange.com
* * *
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
30 June 2024
Suffering is part of the human condition. It is a mystery somehow bound up with the invasion of God’s good creation by evil. But the God we see in the face of Jesus Christ is a God who always works to alleviate human suffering; he doesn’t send it as a punishment. It may be true that since the time of Jesus our prayers for the alleviation of human suffering have not always been answered in the way we would have liked; this again is part of the mystery. But it should not cause us to doubt the basic desire of God is to deliver us from evil, not to inflict it on us.
www.reflectionsonhim.com
* * *