Saturday, January 3, 2015

1/7/2015 – Wednesday after Epiphany – Raymond of Pennafort – Mark 6:45-52

       Jesus had just performed the multiplication of the loaves and the fish.  Even with this great miracle, the disciples still hadn’t fully figured out what was going on or what their great teacher was trying to teach them.  Afterwards, he performs another miracle: walking on the water toward the disciples in the boat and calming the storm.  Still, there remains a lot of misunderstandings and fear in their minds.  They think that they had just seen a ghost. They just can’t understand what is going on.  It defies their expectations and common sense.
        God leads us down different roads in life. Sometimes, he leads us to some very unexpected places.  We take in our reality and where we see God speaking to us, and then, hopefully, we feel called to action, to act upon the will of God in our lives.  We have a very interesting saint today from Barcelona, Spain in the 12th century  - St Raymond of Pennafort.   He was very devoted to the Blessed Mother as a child and a youth, where his tender heart touched all those he knew.  He became a famous teacher, but left that to join the Dominicans, and then later help found an order that helped the poor Christians of his day who had been captured by the Moors. Raymond is most well known today for having codified and rearranged Canon Law for Pope Gregory IX, a system that largely stayed in place for about 700 years, until the new codification of Canon Law in 1917.  So, St Raymond is deservedly known as the patron saint of all lawyers, and specifically Canon Lawyers.   Raymond lived to be 100.
         When God calls out to us sometimes, we might be afraid, and we might feel like we are being tossed about the rough waters of a turbulent sea.  But fear not – the Lord is at our side.  He is not a ghost.  He is real.  And he asks us to do his will. 

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