(Memorial of Our Lady on Saturday • Optional Memorial of St. Albert the Great)
LECTIO — I Listen
Today Jesus tells a parable…
A widow refuses to give up.
A judge refuses to care.
And yet—persistence moves the immovable. Justice breaks through indifference.
And Jesus asks me the piercing question:
“…when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Luke 18:8
From Dilexi te §27, I hear another echo:
True worship is proven through mercy—through letting the Spirit transform me so that I begin to love without calculation, without self-interest, with the gratuitous generosity of Christ Himself.
MEDITATIO — I Reflect
What word binds it all together today?
Perseverance.
Persistent prayer. Persistent mercy. Persistent hope.
Last night, leaving St. Mary’s Cathedral after evening Mass, one of the many daylilies my father planted more than a decade ago caught my eye—fully open due to an an Indian summer in November.
This morning, when I returned, the bloom had folded in on itself, chilled by the early dawn. I almost walked away, waiting for a “better” moment.
But something within me whispered:
“Take the picture now. It is what it is.”
It struck me:
Faith is like that.
The Kingdom is like that.
The Church is like that.
We bloom in God’s time—not always under ideal light, but faithfully, persistently, stubbornly.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops was briefly unsettled this week when Bishop Joseph Strickland intervened against Fr James Martin over a recent confirmation liturgy involving an openly “married” homosexual couple.
And as I pray for my own diocese, I find myself holding hope that Bishop Strickland—despite the tension, despite his public raising of a lesser scandal to advance his critique of others—may yet sit in the Cathedra of Amarillo and allow Christ to finish the work He began in him.
Because the same Spirit who urges the widow to keep “bothering” can still work conversion, healing, and unity in the heart of any shepherd.
And the daylily reminds me:
God blooms where we least expect.
Sometimes only for a moment.
And sometimes after long winters of pruning and division.
ORATIO — I Pray
Lord, make my heart like that widow:
unyielding in prayer, unafraid of silence,
persistent in hope,
and ready to believe that even the hardest hearts—others’ and my own—can be softened by Your mercy.
Transform my worship into works of generosity,
my devotion into a love that expects nothing in return,
my persistence into faith that does not wilt at the coldness of the world.
Mother Mary,
you who pondered all things in your heart
and did not grow weary—
teach me to persevere.
CONTEMPLATIO — I Rest
I sit with that daylily—half-open, frost-kissed, imperfect—
and I allow it to become a small icon of the Church,
of my own soul,
of the Kingdom that is already blooming
even when I cannot see its fullness.
ACTIO — I Live It
“The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast”. For this reason, the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion. It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent. So what they all need is an “ecological conversion”, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.
— Laudato Si’ §217
“The ecological conversion needed… must be a community conversion.”
Today I will practice persistent mercy.
I will choose one difficult person, one strained relationship,
and offer an unexpected act of kindness—
not because it is easy,
but because the Kingdom grows through small, steady, hidden acts of love.
