Thursday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

Collect of Saint Paul

Lectionary: 428

We have been reassured about you, brothers and sisters,
in our every distress and affliction, through your faith.
For we now live, if you stand firm in the Lord.
What thanksgiving, then, can we render to God for you,
for all the joy we feel on your account before our God?

Those who turn to the Letters of Saint Paul looking for the picture of their ideal hero will find neither a Lone Ranger nor a tall, silent type, nor a defiant maverick. They will find a man who counts on others to keep the faith with him and for him, as he keeps it for them. 

Especially as he cooled his heels in several Roman jails he loved to "see" his people in Thessalonica, Philippi, and Corinth worshipping God. He was there in spirit and he was sure they were there in fact. Without that assurance, he might have collapsed altogether. 

Certainly, during this long agonizing year and a half, when I have, more often than not, celebrated Mass in an empty chapel, with only a low-def TV camera for company, I have hoped someone is out there, in a hospital bed, praying with me. I rarely had any feedback from them. More often, they told me they'd slept through it; hospital patients need much sleep! Or the doctors came in. 

I didn't want to hear about it. Let me think you were there.

I am sure millions of Catholics have hoped their parish priests were celebrating the Mass during the epidemic, even if they could not attend. We cannot stop praying!

Like Saint Paul, we count on each other to be there, faithful in prayer and dependable in works of mercy. That is how the Lord remains with us through his Body the Church. If our fidelity fails, we send a mixed signal to a world which desperately needs a clear and certain sign of God's abiding presence.