Day 16 of Lent: March 20, 2014: “I the Lord search the mind and try the heart” (Jer. 17:10)

Day 16 of Lent:

 March 20, 2014:

“I the Lord search 

         the mind and

                  try the heart”

                                                                (Jeremiah 17:10)

God searched the mind and tested the heart of the rich man in the Gospel and found him to be indifferent and insensitive to Lazarus. Lazarus in Hebrew means God helps. If you claim to know the mind of God and heart full of love for God but in turn refuse to attend to the poor at your door, you are becoming the rich man who is heading for destruction. God can only give to every human person according ‘to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings’.

In his first apostolic exhortation Pope Francis speaks of his desire that “I want a Church which is poor and for the poor”. He urges us to “find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them” (EG 198). How often we ignore the poor among us by buying into a culture of ‘wastefulness’? How often we ignore the elderly, the sick, the vulnerable in our community? If only we will begin by a ‘loving attentiveness’, by recognizing that they ‘exist’ among us, that will be a start of genuine show of kindness and goodness. When we begin to pay attention to the ‘throw-away culture’, discarding the ‘unwanted’, the poor, we realize that we do not provide any spiritual care let

alone any material help to the vulnerable in our midst. During lent we take comfort in putting our excess money or very little money for the poor as a way of reaching out to them. If God were to really test our heart will we be found wanting in genuine attentiveness, love and care for the poor? As the Bishops in the Philippines once said, “no one is so rich that he cannot receive and no one is so poor that he cannot give”.  When was the last time that I really spend some quality time with a poor person, listen to their stories, and really shared with them my love? Let this lent challenge us to go out of our normal ways and genuinely seek, share, show and shower a poor person with God’s own love.

God Bless you always!
Sincerely Yours,
Rev. Fr. Cyriac Chandy Mattathilanickal, MS

Wishing you and yours A Holy Lent!

Rev. Fr. Tom Puthusseril, M.S.

Shrine Director