Clean Thursday. Our Venerable Father and Confessor Procopius the Decapolitan (716-40)
Great Fast Day 4. Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Read
Proverbs 3:1-19
Today I’m going to focus on verses 5-8 of today’s reading. This section is an admonition to trust in God rather than in our own insight or wisdom. If this sounds strange to you, that’s not surprising: our culture encourages us to be suspicious of external authority and power, and instead to rely on our own intellect and reasoning, and sometimes to just go with our “gut”. We see this expressed in the songs, movies, and tv shows of the past 3-4 generations – those who follow their own wits and passions, rather than conforming to a bland and oppressive standard, are the true heroes of modern culture.
However, there is a problem with this way of living a good life: our human reasoning, while a gift from God, is fallen, like everything else in our lives. True, the Catholic Church upholds reason as part of how humans know God. But the Church also makes clear that our mental capacities need correction. There is a prayer in the Byzantine liturgy called the “Prayer of the Hours,” which is recited six times a day (at the Midnight Office, at Compline before bed, and at the four ‘little hours’ recited throughout the day). This prayer includes the petition that God would “correct our thoughts, and make our knowledge whole and sober.” As we read through Proverbs this Lent, let’s ask God to correct our thinking, to restore our intellectual approach and priorities to their proper state, so that we can hear HIS voice and follow HIS word.