Supplement Your Faith June 5

Piety

God, you are the only true landowner. Help us to be good stewards of the gifts which you have entrusted to our care. Guide our lives so we respect the dignity in each person and also so that we call on our leaders, as Jesus did, to be good examples.

Protect us from the forces urging us to reject you. Help us to carry out your work to rebuild the temple of the Kingdom of God on earth. Through our devotion, knowledge and mutual affection help us to fulfill your commandment to love one another. Amen.

Study
http://www.usccb.org/nab/060506.shtml

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Mark 12:10

“Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, virtue with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with devotion, devotion with mutual affection, mutual affection with love.” 2 Peter 1:5-7

As we emerge from the 90-plus days of the Lent, Triduum and Easter seasons, our first readings back in ordinary time remind us of the very basics of Cursillo. In 2 Peter 1, we see Peter connect all three facets of the Cursillo tripod. He connects piety, study and action as a continuum of qualities that build upon each other to the ultimate task – love.

Peace in abundance comes through knowledge (study) of God and Jesus Christ. Knowledge comes through piety (devotion) based upon self-control of the desires of the body and endurance of the hardships and tests that we face. Devotion leads to mutual affection – mutual with God and mutual with our sisters and brothers because they too are children of God. When we have mutual affection, we will perform acts of love for each other in the form of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

If Peter is presenting us with a prescription for the spiritual life, then Jesus in Mark’s Gospel is giving us a prescription for interactions with the religious and legal authorities as well as each other in the global village.

The story of the vineyard draws on Isaiah’s “love song for the vineyard” in Isaiah 5ff. While these are allegorical parables of the rejection of the Messiah, the stories also reflect the experiences of the tenant farmers of the day who were beholden to absentee landlords. Yet God is the only true landowner.

Action

Land today is a fight for value. People buy and sell houses to turn the transactions into financial security for the future. Land today also is a flight for value. Right in our midst, there are people who have no home, no land and no privilege. Others leave their homeland trying to migrate here as did our ancestors in order to share in the better life that the American promise holds out.

The immigration debate as well as trade debates, challenge us to develop an economy in which all people share in its success.

“Our faith calls us to measure this economy, not by what it produces but also by how it touches human life and whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person. Economic decisions have human consequences and moral content; they help or hurt people, strengthen or weaken family life, advance or diminish the quality of justice in our land,” wrote the U.S. Bishops in 1986 on the economy.

It was twenty years ago that the U.S. bishops published the pastoral letter “Economic Justice for All.” You can read it at this Internet site http://www.osjspm.org/cst/eja.htm. The Bishops concluded:

Like Mary in proclaiming her Magnificat, we marvel at the wonders God has done for us, how God has raised up the poor and the lowly and promised great things for them in the Kingdom. God now asks of us sacrifices and reflection on our reverence for human dignity - in ourselves and in others -and on our service and discipleship, so that the divine goal for the human family and this earth can be fulfilled. Communion with God, sharing God's life, involves a mutual bonding with all on this globe. Jesus taught us to love God and one another and that the concept of neighbor is without limit. We know that we are called to be members of a new covenant of love. We have to move from our devotion to independence, through an understanding of interdependence, to a commitment to human solidarity. That challenge must find its realization in the kind of community we build among us. Love implies concern for all - especially the poor - and a continued search for those social and economic structures that permit everyone to share in a community that is a part of a redeemed creation (Rom 8:21-23).[1]

How can you touch human life to protect the dignity of each human person in your economic life?

[1] http://www.osjspm.org/cst/eja.htm, section 365.