23rd Week, Tuesday, Sept 9: Saint Peter Claver
Colossians 2:6-15 / Luke 6:12-19
Live in Christ; Abound with thanksgiving.
Books on how to reduce stress are among the best-selling items in bookstores. An excellent book on this subject is Dr. Hans Selye’s Stress of Life. The Montreal expert says that one of the simplest ways to reduce stress is to develop a sense of gratitude. Selye says | that people who focus on life's blessings invariably experience contentment and peace, while people who focus on life’s crosses and complain about them invariably experience anxiety and tension, Paul's exhortation to “abound with thanksgiving”’ isn’t just good theology; it’s also good medicine.***
Think of five things for which we should “abound with thanksgiving.” “Our Father, why, when we have so much to thank you for, have we nothing to say? Why, when things go wrong, are you the first to hear?” Lucy Scott Watkins
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The community of the Christians of Colossae was threatened with deviations from pagan philosophies and Jewish practices. In the very dense and rich passage of today, Paul insists that all that counts is Christ; we live in him through baptism, and die and rise with him.
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This passage usually bears the title of “warning against heresies". 1t is a warning, but more than that, it is a summary of what Christian spirituality is: Live your whole life according to Christ: We must be rooted and founded in HIM. Our roots must be in him. He is the soil. He gives us food and water. The principle of life in us will constantly feed on him and find all its nourishment in Christ. It will absorb the life-giving water and change it in the light into living matter. He is also the rock on which our life is built. Our foundation is sure and our structure firm and immovable, because it is built on the rock (1 Corinthians 10,4). We are both ‘life’ and ‘structure’. Constantly changing and growing, and yet immovable, fixed and firm. And both in Christ. In him we have the fullness of life and the permanency of our existence. Older writers stressed that to become another Christ is the aim of all spirituality. Modern authors use the words Self-fulfilment, a self-realisation or Sadhana. Paul says the two are the same. We become what we are, we become fully ourselves when we are in Christ, in whom dwells the fullness of the divinity.
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Living nowadays in a fast-paced and high-stressed society, it is inevitable that we will experience worry and anxiety. Hence one of the resulting afflictions could be that we will have sleepless nights even as we lie in bed at night. Weighing heavily on our minds might be those difficult decisions to make, or bugging problems that don't seem to have any solutions. So, although we might be lying in bed, yet our minds are running and racing all over the place. In our minds, we might be running through all the options that we take on for an action plan. But in situations like these, we may miss the obvious and necessary first option.
Very often we may just miss out God as the first option. In fact, we often put God as the last option, and that's because everything else has failed. In the gospel, we see that Jesus did not spend the whole night thinking; rather He spent the whole night praying. For Jesus, God was always the first option and also the only option.
Like Jesus, we should also ask God for His blessings before we begin any task and ask for His continued blessings on the work we are doing. For us, God must always be the first and only option. Any other options will result in sleepless nights.
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As in other very important occasions in his life, Jesus prays before selecting twelve apostles from among his disciples. For this is a very important moment. He will train them and then will take the risk of entrusting his own work to fallible people. He knows they will not always do the best they can, as they will have moments of fear, discouragement, cowardice and compromises. Still, he trusts them enough and will help them to bring his work to a good end in God’s own good time. In this eucharist we express our trust in the Church of Jesus Christ.
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Prayer
Almighty God, and Father, in one of us, your Son Jesus Christ, is found the fullness of what you are, and which we can only stammer and surmise in our inadequate human thoughts and words. Root us and build us up in Christ; liberate us from all forms of alienation and let us share in his new humanity, that we may live the life of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
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Saint Peter Claver
Feast day September 9
Have you ever been really, really thirsty? Maybe you were hiking or mowing the yard on a hot summer day. Maybe you just came in from the playground or off the basketball court. Think how good a drink of cold water would be. If some kind person brought you water, how would you feel? Peter Claver was that sort of person. Peter felt he was called to be a missionary. When he was 29 years old, Peter left his home in Spain and went to Cartagena (in what is now Colombia), South America. There he continued his studies and was ordained a priest.
Cartagena was a busy city, but its economic success came from dealing in human misery. Cartagena was the main market for the slave trade in the New World. Hundreds of thousands of people were brought there from Africa, herded into warehouses, and auctioned off to the highest bidder. They had been captured, chained together, crowded onto ships, and neglected during the long journey to South America. The conditions were so terrible that an estimated one-third of the captives died during the journey.
Whenever a ship carrying Africans arrived in port, Peter was there. He would hurry down with a jug of water, and a basket full of medicine, fruit, bread, and clothing. He would greet the slaves by giving them a drink of water. His first concern was to tend to their human needs—to ease their suffering and somehow restore their sense of dignity. He saw the suffering Jesus in the people he served. And he heard in their cry: “What you do for others, you do for me.” Peter nursed many back to health and, while they were in warehouses awaiting their sale, he told them that Jesus loved them and gave them the sacraments.
Peter Claver could not eliminate the strong hold that slavery had on society. The hearts and the consciences of many people had been so hardened that they refused to see this evil of slavery in their midst. But Peter did what he could. He tried to be a visible sign that the African slaves were indeed human beings, children of God. By bringing the love of Jesus to them, he was laying the foundations of justice and charity for the future. During his 40 years in Colombia, Peter Claver baptized nearly 300,000 Africans.
A man of deep prayer, unbounded energy, and steady devotion, Peter Claver realized that it was his relationship with Christ that nourished his spirit and gave him the courage to go on when so many problems surrounded his work. When he died the city that had opposed so many of his efforts honoured him.
