Word to the Wise
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - Wednesday in the 24th Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Cor 12:31-13:13 and Luke 7:31-35]WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2018 WEDNESDAY IN THE TWENTY-FOURTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME [1 Corinthians 12:31 - 13:13 and Luke 7:31-35] If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal......Love is patient, love is kind.....Love never fails....So faith, hope and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love. [1 Corinthians] Heads nod in recognition and maybe elbows touch when St. Paul’s well-known words on love are proclaimed. Those words might have been read at the wedding of those heads and elbows! The context for the passage is lost because the preceding words come up in next year’s daily cycle. There was some disagreement in the fractious Corinthian community about the importance of certain “spiritual gifts.” St. Paul offers a bigger context, that of love. This is the gift that keeps on giving. Those of us in pastoral ministry meet many people for whom love is an illusion or a dream. Their lives are filled with abuse or addiction or other trauma. The only thing they experience is power that puts them down. It is this reality that makes our own efforts to love all the more important. Patience and kindness and the other manifestations of love are a healing force. The most physically intimate expression of it is fast disappearing into a commodity, separated from God, the supreme creator of love. Even the subjects of love - spouses, children, family - are endangered by the tyranny of individualism and market demand. St. Paul’s words are a challenge to us to make love far more real and to give it as the greatest gift. AMEN