Our Venerable Father Daniel the Stylite.
Nativity Fast.
1 Timothy 6:17-21; Luke 18:31-34.
Read Luke 18:31-34
Ever re-read a paragraph and come away no wiser, just tired eyes and wasted time? Our eyes move, but our minds, worn or wandering, miss the meaning they’re meant to catch. This is the problem faced by the disciples, not with their eyes but with their ears. Christ tells them plainly of His approaching passion, humiliation and death but they ‘could not understand any of this.’
The main thing separating us from these disciples is time and space, certainly not temperament. The Lord says the same thing to His disciples today, you and me, that His Mystical Body on Earth, the church militant, will pass through the same narrow path of brutalization leading to glorification as did His physical Body during Passion Week, but we don’t understand it:
We look about and wonder why the Church seems stripped and bare,
its vigor, pomp, and dignity dissolved into air;
its glory, grace, and noble weight once shining like a crown,
now flicker faint as shadows where the mighty once knelt down.
Where are the bustling crowds that once huddled under her divine domes, where the religious vocations which stuffed into her convents like warm down inside a parka, why are today’s pews of prophets empty when previous centuries filled them so very well? We see these things just as Christ’s disciples heard these things… but our minds fail to perceive their meaning just as His disciples failed to understand the meaning of His words.
You may still catch yourself re-reading the paragraphs in your bedtime novel, and when you do just remember to not re-read without comprehension the signs God sends us today. His Mystical Body will endure desertion, betrayal, humiliation and death, but on the third day that Body will arise anew. Do you understand?