11 Sep
Kids
“Children love luxury. They have bad manners and love to chatter. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, gobble up dainties at the table, and are tyrants over their teachers.”
It’s interesting to read such comments about the young. Such comments are frequently heard nowadays. what is interesting about the above comments is that they were written by a Greek philosopher 2,500 years ago!
- One of the differences between a man and a boy is that the man’s toys are more expensive!
- taken from “150 More Stories for Preachers and Teachers” by Jack McArdle
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Colossians 2:6-15
You must live your whole life according to the Christ you have received – Jesus the Lord; you must be rooted in him and built on him and held firm by the faith you have been taught, and full of thanksgiving.
Make sure that no one traps you and deprives you of your freedom by some secondhand, empty, rational philosophy based on the principles of this world instead of on Christ.
In his body lives the fullness of divinity, and in him you too find your own fulfilment, in the one who is head of every Sovereignty and Power.
In him you have been circumcised, with circumcision not performed by the human hand, but by the complete stripping of your body of flesh. This is circumcision according to Christ. You have been buried with him, when you were baptised; and by baptism, too, you have been raised up with him through your belief in the power of God who raised him from the dead. You were dead, because you were sinners and had not been circumcised; he has brought you to life with him, he has forgiven us all our sins.
He has overridden the Law, and cancelled every record of the debt that we had to pay; he has done away with it by nailing it to the cross; and so he got rid of the Sovereignties and the Powers, and paraded them in public, behind him in his triumphal procession.
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Luke 6:12-19
Jesus went out into the hills to pray; and he spent the whole night in prayer to God. When day came he summoned his disciples and picked out twelve of them; he called them “apostles”: Simon whom he called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon called the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot who became a traitor.
He then came down with them and stopped at a piece of level ground where there was a large gathering of his disciples with a great crowd of people from all parts of Judaea and from Jerusalem and from the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon who had come to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. People tormented by unclean spirits were also cured, and everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him because power came out of him that cured them all.
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Imagine you have a child, and throughout his developmental years, you never said ‘no’ to him. From somewhere you read or heard that if a child hears the word ‘no’ when he makes a request from you, he will grow up with a fear of rejection. So in order to prevent that, you say ‘yes’ to every request. After twenty years of having said ‘yes’, your child asks something of you which you cannot give. Can you say ‘no’? Chances are, you can’t. And your child, whom you’ve never said ‘no’ to, is not your child, but your master; you are his slave.
What does this have to do with today’s readings? In the first reading, St. Paul tells the Colossians: Make sure that no one traps you and deprives you of your freedom by some secondhand, empty, rational philosophy based on the principles of this world instead of on Christ.
What is the philosophy that today’s generation is taught? I think it would be Nike’s tagline “Just do it.” I wrote to an American about sexual freedom recently. Our generation is taught today that sexual freedom means being able to “just do it” without fear of constraints from previous generations or religious beliefs. Today’s generation tends to believe that if they can “just do it”, if they can say ‘yes’ to sex whenever, wherever and however they want to, only then are they sexually free.
However, a generation of people who won’t say ‘no’ to sex, quickly becomes a generation of people who can’t say ‘no’ to sex. A person who can’t say ‘no’ to sex is not sexually free. He or she is a slave to sex. This means that the philosophy that today’s generation is taught is a “secondhand, empty, rational philosophy based on the principles of this world” and it is one that traps them and deprives them of their sexual freedom.
If today’s generation (and I’m not referring just to the youth) is quickly becoming a generation of sex slaves, what then can be done for us? How can we find true freedom if the philosophy of the world only serves to make us slaves? In the gospel reading, we see Jesus and his apostles setting people free of their diseases, their demons, and all that chains them down. Today, we can find freedom from sexual slavery in the Church’s teaching of abstinence.
Abstinence is applicable not only to single persons, but persons who are married as well. The Church teaches abstinence is also healthy for married people. There are times when married people have to abstain from sex, such as when due to illness, pregnancy, travel or other reasons. What would a person who cannot say ‘no’ to sex do in cases when abstinence seems to be the only answer? If you think about it for a moment, you will understand why the media has been glorifying those answers.
Abstinence is the true test of whether one has sexual freedom or not, because abstinence shows that a person can say ‘no’ to sex, even at times when he can say ‘yes’. Freedom means having a choice and being able to make either choice. In Christ we find freedom, not just sexual freedom, but freedom in the best sense of the word.
Today is September 11, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America. We also remember that one person that is more dangerous than all the terrorists put together is Alfred Kinsey, the grandfather of the sexual revolution which took place all over the world. The impact of his work on sexual morality has truly devastated the world, and America, much more than any terrorist will ever do.
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Prayer:
Dear Lord, help us to desire true sexual freedom in the way that you offer it to us. Grant us the courage to turn our backs on the secondhand philosophy of the world that we are surrounded with, and turn our eyes to the redemption that you offer us through your cross. Amen.
Give Thanks to the Lord for: Showing us what true sexual freedom is.
Upcoming Readings:
Wed, 12 Sep – Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 1:46-55; Most Holy Name of Mary
Thu, 13 Sep – Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 6:27-38; Memorial for St. John Chrysostom, bishop, doctor of the Church
Fri, 14 Sep – Numbers 21:4b-9; Philemon 2:6-11; John 3:13-17; Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Sat, 15 Sep – 1 Hebrews 5:7-9; John 19:25-27; Our Lady of Sorrows
Sun, 16 Sep – Exodus 32:7-11, 13-14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-32; Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
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Disclaimer: The reflections expressed in this e-mail are the writer’s own. They may not necessarily reflect the teachings of the Catholic Church. Nonetheless we should all be able to learn something from it.
