Faith

Day 1

Why do you confuse yourselves by worrying? Leave the care of your affairs to me and everything will be peaceful. I say to you in truth that every act of true, blind, complete surrender to me produces the effect that you desire and resolves all difficult situations.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Day 2

Surrender to me does not mean to fret, to be upset, or to lose hope, nor does it mean offering to me a worried prayer asking me to follow you and change your worry into prayer. It is against this surrender, deeply against it, to worry, to be nervous and to desire to think about the consequences of anything.

It is like the confusion that children feel when they ask their mother to see to their needs, and then try to take care of those needs for themselves so that their childlike efforts get in their mother’s way. Surrender means to placidly close the eyes of the soul, to turn away from thoughts of tribulation and to put yourself in my care, so that only I act, saying, “You take care of it.”

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Day 3

How many things I do when the soul, in so much spiritual and material need, turns to me, looks at me and says to me, “You take care of it,” then closes its eyes and rests. In pain you pray for me to act, but that I act in the way you want. You do not turn to me, instead, you want me to adapt to your ideas. You are not sick people who ask the doctor to cure you, but rather sick people who tell the doctor how to. So do not act this way, but pray as I taught you in the Our Father: “Hallowed be thy Name,” that is, be glorified in my need. “Thy kingdom come,” that is, let all that is in us and in the world be in accord with your kingdom. “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” that is, in our need, decide as you see fit for our temporal and eternal life. If you say to me truly: “Thy will be done,” which is the same as saying: “You take care of it,” I will intervene with all my omnipotence, and I will resolve the most difficult situations.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Day 4

You see evil growing instead of weakening? Do not worry. Close your eyes and say to me with faith: “Thy will be done, You take care of it.” I say to you that I will take care of it, and that I will intervene as does a doctor and I will accomplish miracles when they are needed. Do you see that the sick person is getting worse? Do not be upset, but close your eyes and say, “You take care of it.” I say to you that I will take care of it, and that there is no medicine more powerful than my loving intervention. By my love, I promise this to you.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Day 5

And when I must lead you on a path different from the one you see, I will prepare you; I will carry you in my arms; I will let you find yourself, like children who have fallen asleep in their mother’s arms, on the other bank of the river. What troubles you and hurts you immensely are your reason, your thoughts and worry, and your desire at all costs to deal with what afflicts you.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Day 6

You are sleepless; you want to judge everything, direct everything and see to everything and you surrender to human strength, or worse—to men themselves, trusting in their intervention—this is what hinders my words and my views. Oh, how much I wish from you this surrender, to help you; and how I suffer when I see you so agitated! Satan tries to do exactly this: to agitate you and to remove you from my protection and to throw you into the jaws of human initiative. So, trust only in me, rest in me, surrender to me in everything.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Day 7

I perform miracles in proportion to your full surrender to me and to your not thinking of yourselves. I sow treasure troves of graces when you are in the deepest poverty. No person of reason, no thinker, has ever performed miracles, not even among the saints. He does divine works whosoever surrenders to God. So don’t think about it any more, because your mind is acute and for you it is very hard to see evil and to trust in me and to not think of yourself. Do this for all your needs, do this, all of you, and you will see great continual silent miracles. I will take care of things, I promise this to you.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Day 8

Close your eyes and let yourself be carried away on the flowing current of my grace; close your eyes and do not think of the present, turning your thoughts away from the future just as you would from temptation. Repose in me, believing in my goodness, and I promise you by my love that if you say, “You take care of it,” I will take care of it all; I will console you, liberate you and guide you.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Day 9

Pray always in readiness to surrender, and you will receive from it great peace and great rewards, even when I confer on you the grace of immolation, of repentance, and of love. Then what does suffering matter? It seems impossible to you? Close your eyes and say with all your soul, “Jesus, you take care of it.” Do not be afraid, I will take care of things and you will bless my name by humbling yourself. A thousand prayers cannot equal one single act of surrender, remember this well. There is no novena more effective than this.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times)

Mother, I am yours now and forever.
Through you and with you
I always want to belong
completely to Jesus.

It’s probably the last thing Peter ever expected to hear.

There, in that moment, Jesus Christ was speaking of suffering and death, how he would be killed and yet be raised. What Jesus was describing was shocking. Peter, hearing this grim prophecy, was trying (or so he thought) to express support and loyalty.

“God forbid, Lord!” Peter said. “No such thing shall ever happen to you.”

That was too much for Jesus. He turned to the one he had called The Rock, and in four quick words, effectively dismissed him as clay.

“Get behind me, Satan,” Jesus said to him. “You are an obstacle to me.”

Imagine the look on Peter’s face — the shock, the shame, the disbelief.

But Jesus wasn’t finished. “You are thinking not as God does,” he explained, “but as human beings do.”

This brings us to a central question of this Sunday’s scripture, and a challenge that should humble us all.

You can sum it up in four little words: how does God think?

Reflecting on that can be an effective and sobering examination of conscience. It forces us to look at ourselves and our choices differently. Let’s face it: Most of the time, we go about our lives, slogging through problems and pitfalls and trying our best, doing what we hope is right, and making choices we pray will be part of God’s plan for us.

But how do we know? How can we really be certain? Well, honestly, we can’t.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. This Gospel asks us to try, to step outside our normal way of doing things — outside our comfort zone, if you will — and to consider, even briefly: What does God think of what I’m doing?

More pointedly: How does God think?

Are we thinking with God, like God? Or are we deluding ourselves into thinking “as human beings do?” How can we know?

This Sunday’s reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans offers some advice:

“Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.”

It begins with realizing that we are called not to be conformists — but to be transformed. To change. To discern. To grow beyond what we are and, in the process, fulfill the will of God.

No one said it would be easy. As Jesus explained: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

The hard reality of all that means that in the Christian life — a life of sacrifice and self-giving, of devotion to God and to our neighbor — there will be suffering. We will carry the weight of wood. We will feel thorns. We will bleed.

In one of his most celebrated quotes, Daniel Berrigan put it bluntly. “If you want to follow Jesus,” he once said, “you better look good on wood.”

What Jesus was telling Peter, and us, was that this new way of living — The Way — would come at a cost. As St. Paul would put it: It’s not for conformists, or those who want to be comfortable. It is for those who wish to be forever changed, transformed, and who want to transform the world.

We are called to be those people — the original Transformers! — and to turn with prayerful trust to the God who thinks differently, acts differently, plans differently and who invites us, in fact, to love differently.

We may not understand it. Peter surely didn’t. But part of our ongoing journey through the Christian life is learning to embrace God’s plan for each of our lives, just as Jesus did, and to pray in quiet hope for the gift of understanding and, ultimately, acceptance. It’s a journey without end, a quest without limits. And it can be full of astonishments.

Think you know how God thinks? Think again. And again.

Deacon Greg Kandra is an award-winning author and journalist, and creator of the blog, “The Deacon’s Bench.”

At first blush, you can’t help but wonder: what kind of Jesus is this?

The Jesus in this Gospel isn’t the comforting figure preaching love and mercy, with a light yoke and an easy burden and a kind word for the sick or the blind.

Instead, he seems to be a figure with a hard heart and a cold attitude. He sounds, in fact, like a bigot. He lectures a Canaanite woman, telling her that his mission was not meant for her. When she begs a miracle for her tormented daughter, he snaps back: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”

Is he serious?

Undoubtedly — but not in the way we may think. What follows carries a powerful lesson for the apostles and for all of us.

Here, Jesus doesn’t respond to the Canaanite woman right away. He waits to see what the apostles will do. Finally, they speak up. “Send her away,” they complain, “for she keeps calling after us.”

That’s exactly what he needed. They hand the rabbi an opening and he seizes it.

At first, Jesus takes their side. He shows indifference, even disdain, for The Other. He doesn’t want to be bothered by a woman who is not a Jew. He refers to her and her kind as an animal — which may be what some of his followers are thinking. But she responds: “Even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”

“O woman,” Jesus replies, “Great is your faith!” With that, her daughter is healed.

The apostles may have been shocked at this turn of events. But we shouldn’t be. Jesus surely knew well the words from Isaiah that we hear in this Sunday’s first reading:

“The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord . . . them I will bring to my holy mountain. My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

And he certainly whispered in prayer countless times these words of the psalmist:

“May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you!”

He understood (in a way the apostles evidently did not) that his mission was for all who sought God with a sincere heart. The author of this Gospel (composed at a time when Gentile Christians were growing in number) seized on this episode to make a powerful point about inclusion and welcome.

The Jesus we meet in this passage uses a kind of reverse psychology to pose a challenge to his followers and by extension to every one of us. He shows that prejudice and exclusion have no place in the Christian heart.

He leaves us with pressing questions.

—Who are the Canaanite women in our world today?

—Who are the ones in our lives who “keep calling after us”?

—Who are The Others we would prefer to dismiss or disregard?

—Who are the “foreigners” we’d prefer to ignore?

The wisdom from Isaiah should haunt us all. “My house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples.” Foreigners are not to be shunned, cast out or excluded.

Put another way: all are welcome.

The Sunday’s scripture readings ask us to set aside our biases, to break down walls, to consider people not by their origins or their backgrounds and to see them as Jesus did: as people seeking God in good faith.

At a moment when so much of the world is divided and polarized — even, regrettably, within the walls of our churches — the readings this Sunday call us to consider others with the sympathetic heart of Christ.

The Gospel dares us to act and think differently: to consider those who are not like us; to listen to those we’d rather ignore; to give people who are mistreated a measure of dignity.

What kind of Jesus do we meet in this Gospel?

He is the one we know so well — the one who sees what really matters, who teaches us what we need to learn and who manages to turn even the most unlikely encounter into a miracle.

Deacon Greg Kandra is an award-winning author and journalist, and creator of the blog, “The Deacon’s Bench.” He serves in the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York.

Pope’s January Prayer Intention For educators We pray that educators may be credible witnesses, teaching fraternity rather than competition and helping the youngest and most vulnerable above all.

The following are Holy Days of Obligation for 2023:

Holy Days of Obligation	Description
Sunday, Jan. 1	Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God
Thursday, May 18	Ascension Thursday
Tuesday, Aug. 15	Solemnity of the Assumption
Wedday, Nov. 1	All Saints Day
Friday, Dec. 8	Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
Monday, Dec. 25	Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord (Christmas)

Glorious Archangel St. Raphael, great prince of the heavenly court, you are illustrious for your gifts of wisdom and grace. You are a guide of those who journey by land or sea or air, consoler of the afflicted, and refuge of sinners. We beg you, assist us in all our needs and in all the sufferings of this life, as once you helped the young Tobias on his travels. Because you are the “medicine of God” we humbly pray you to heal the many infirmities of our souls and the ills that afflict our bodies. We especially ask your guidance of our diocese as we journey toward the rebuilding of a cathedral bearing your name, and the great grace of purity to prepare us to be temples of the Holy Spirit. As our intercessor, beg the Blessed Trinity to prosper the work of our hands and, above all, to bring us, face-to-face, into their Holy presence. Amen.