Sunday Gospel Reflection, March 1, 2026: All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you

All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you…
Are we blessed? Are we blessing? 

    When, in the Book of Genesis, the Lord tells Abram to go forth from the land of his kinsfolk to a land that the Lord will show him, Abram must abandon all he knows and trust that God will fulfill all his promises: I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, the Lord says to Abram. I will make your name great. I will bless those who bless you. But Abram must then be a witness to all of the blessings of God, for God created us to be blessing to one another. All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you, God says. 

    Like Abram, and as Psalm 33 reminds us we must place our trust in the Lord, hoping for his kindness… and for nothing else. Absolute trust in God is our greatest hope, for it is through ongoing trust that our relationship with God develops over time. Timothy, the leader of the Christian community at Ephesus, was similarly called to trust in God’s Word, as Paul tells him, with the strength that comes from God. In spite of any hardship Timothy is experiencing, he knows he has been called to a holy life. God will steer him in the right direction, giving him the strength to give witness to the gospel, so long as Timothy remains open to God’s love and willing to share God’s blessing with all. 

    In Matthew’s Gospel, Peter, James and John are witnesses to an impossible scene: on a high mountain, Jesus is transfigured before them; his face shines like the sun and his clothes become white as light. Do the three disciples trust enough to accept this revelation as God has chosen to reveal it to them? Do they recognize the blessing they are experiencing? Peter seems confused and proposes making three tents on the site. But the Transfiguration is a profound event out of space and time that cannot be memorialized by tents. If the three concentrate and listen to Jesus, they will know how much they are loved by God and how God wants them to bless their world. 

    Revelation is not easy, often involving a significant disruption of our comfort zone, challenging us to see things differently. If we look, if we are open, we will see the blessings of God revealed in our lives and trust in his promises. Only then will the communities of the earth find blessing… in us.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

A garden of solitude (Henri Nouwen)

   To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play. 

--Henri Nouwen 

Image source: Ryan Mountain, https://www.hikespeak.com/ca-desert/
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Lent is a time to recenter (Fr. Patrick Michaels)

   Our faith journey is to try and clarify where our focus is. Lent is an attempt to try and focus our energies, to focus our lives. We come at this season as people who know sin. We do know sin. It’s not just a past reality for us; it’s something we struggle with every day. We struggle to make good choices. We struggle to do what’s going to be the most loving thing possible, and yet we do fail, because our focus goes out of whack. When we’re sinning, our focus, our center, cannot be Christ. It’s not possible. 

   So, we need to refocus, recenter. Lent is our time to recenter, to put ourselves back in that place where what we decide comes from the depths of our hearts where Christ dwells in us, so that we know the difference between the delusions of our egos and the truth of our hearts, and so that we choose rightly. 

   This journey is a gift, a time to walk together, to join with one another, in finding our center and letting it be the center of our lives as a community and our lives as members of that community, so that the love of Christ might fill our world. 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, March 9, 2025

Image source: https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/diy-dictionary-plumb-bob/?srsltid=AfmBOor3E_DXIePk1MXztWRa9Nk-BPM1DejfWiHNdphTy6AASsm31-Re

God leaves them free (Marilynne Robinson)

   I think that right through Scriptures, God’s intention is to humanize humanity, to give you a heart of flesh rather than stone. The thing that God does that is so striking is stand apart. He wishes people would — for their own sake, for the sake of the other people, whom he also loves — he wishes they would not kill and not steal and so on. But God leaves them free. He tells them what he considers good and right. But they always have the freedom to transgress, if that’s what they choose to do. And I think that can be understood as God’s loyalty to the idea of their being human, being free, acting creatures. And it’s in the way they are able to act on their own, even in departing from what God wills for them, they have one of the qualities of God: freedom. I think that’s very profound. 

--Marilynne Robinson 

Image source: William Blake, So Judged He Man, Illustration 10 for John Milton's Paradise Lost (1807),  https://emuseum.huntington.org/objects/58/illustration-10-to-miltons-paradise-lost-the-judgment-of
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The only way out is through (Fr. Mike Schmitz)

   Why couldn’t God just take the people of Israel from the place of slavery to the place of promise? Why did they have to go through the desert? Because they needed training. They didn’t know how to live as free people. 

   God is giving us this desert of Lent because we are like the people of Israel: I just want to be done: Lord, just tap me on the head and make me look like Jesus, automatically! But we need this training; we need this place of the Way, because we are called to be people we are currently not, able to do something that we currently cannot. 

   So God is leading us into the desert, where all the things we trusted are finally put down. That’s what Lent is. We’re led into the desert where we are just invited to put down all of the things we trusted in. The desert is a place of training. The desert is a place of testing. The desert is a place of trial. But it’s also the place where all the things I’ve trusted in are absent. All our crutches, all our comforts, are absent. We put down those things we use to buffer between us and life, the distractions, the noise, the diversions, all the things we hold onto that will help us from having to acknowledge that we are not yet who we should be. 

   And so here, at the beginning of Lent, you are entering into a place of training, of testing. So it can’t just be the usual. It can’t just be the status quo. It can’t just be the normal thing I always give up. I can’t just do the same thing I always have done and expect a different result, because we are called to do something new, to go somewhere new, and that means putting down something old. 

   Whenever we find ourselves trusting in ourselves rather than in God alone, that’s what we have to be willing to put down. It will be difficult. It will be difficult. 

   What am I training for? What am I trying to become? 

    I want to be able to live like Jesus. I want to be able to love like Jesus. I want to be able to trust like Jesus. That means I have to go from not-knowing to knowing. That means I need to go from not being able to being able. It is frustrating. 

   And the only way out is through. 

--Excerpt from
Fr. Mike Schmitz’s homily,
Hallow App, Lent,
March 2, 2025

Image source: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/christ-in-the-desert/iwEnS8zpRy4qzw?hl=en&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22z%22%3A8.663783236351296%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A2.734523311575076%2C%22height%22%3A1.2374999999999994%7D%7D

Make friends with the desert (Bishop Robert Barron / Fr. Ron. Rolheiser)

Deserts are places of no distractions,
when we get down to spiritual basics
with nothing to divert us from the great questions.

--Bishop Robert Barron

    The Gospels invite us to make friends with the desert, the cross, with ashes, with self-renunciation, with humiliation, with our shadow, and with death itself. We grow by letting the desert work us over, by renouncing cherished dreams to accept the cross, by letting the humiliations that befall us deepen our character, by having the courage to face our own deep chaos, and by making peace with our own mortality. 

--Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Facebook, November 5, 2025

Image source: https://cathopic.com/photo/57450-jesus-christ-in-the-desert 
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He took upon himself the shame of Adam (Pope Francis)

    Adam, after his sin, experiences shame, he feels naked, he senses the weight of what he has done; and yet God does not abandon him: if that moment of sin marks the beginning of his exile from God, there is already a promise of return, a possibility of return. God immediately asks: "Adam, where are you?" He seeks him out. Jesus took on our nakedness, he took upon himself the shame of Adam, the nakedness of his sin, in order to wash away our sin: by his wounds we have been healed. Remember what Saint Paul says: "What shall I boast of, if not my weakness, my poverty? Precisely in feeling my sinfulness, in looking at my sins, I can see and encounter God’s mercy, his love, and go to him to receive forgiveness. 

--Pope Francis 

Image source: La Tentation d'Adam et Eve, Cathédrale Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, Clermont-Ferrand, France, http://luc.greliche.free.fr/Mathieu/clermontferrand0402.html 
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