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Sunday, September 13, 2026
Hello folks,
The Lord be with you all!
This Sunday’s readings speak a lot about forgiveness. It is not just about forgiveness of financial debts, but also of all that the Lord would have to forgive us in order for us to be able to live in His Presence, and there is an inescapable echo that this is what we need to forgive others, in order to live in God’s Presence too.
The first reading contains a striking line: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” What a description! To “hug them tight” shows that they have become for the person an object of great desire, and not to be surrendered. Forgiveness directly opposes this. Many people are fine with forgiveness in the abstract, but sometimes there is something so horrible in their understanding that they cannot forgive it. Sometimes, there are people who experience and hold on to every wound, hurt or slight, but other times, it is just one deep wound that they cannot let go of, and they surround that wound with a sort of protective covering and hug tight the anger they have against a particular person. To avoid pain, we can be tempted to allow a hardness of heart to develop so that we no longer have compassion for the difficult person, the evil person, the sinner.
Our Lord has felt all these wounds too most deeply. All of you, who are members of His Body, He intimately experiences your suffering too. He does not harden His Sacred Heart to your sufferings, but amazingly neither does He harden His Sacred Heart to the people who inflict these sufferings. Yet, all too often we ignore not just the suffering of friends, but the suffering of Christ Himself. This is one of the messages of the Sacred Heart of Jesus: that He loved us to the end of human life with the love of God in a real human heart. And we don’t know this, nor appreciate it. And even more sadly, those of us who have some idea of it, especially those of us consecrated to Him, we too ignore this truth and don’t console Him in His suffering for us. Please bring this to prayer, and try to take some time to be with Him in the suffering He endures for our sins, and express gratitude for the times He has forgiven your sins, and pray for the grace of repentance for those of us who remain stuck in sin, especially those who have hurt you or those who you love! Feel free to ask the Lord to immerse your heart in His that He might soften what has been hardened and grant you the grace to persevere in love even in the midst of suffering.
We will be covering more about Our Lord’s Sacred Heart in the coming weeks, including offering a great movie to help experience some of this life changing message.
I hope you will enjoy the great Collaborative brunch following the 9am Mass tomorrow/today. Thank you to all the volunteers who have helped with the planning and execution of this great event!
Religious Education for children starts up next weekend (not too late to sign up via our website), and adult faith formation opportunities as well (see bulletin). I also want to invite people to become members of small faith sharing groups. This deserves far more bulletin space but my column can’t accommodate it this week. Nonetheless, parishioner Mr. Jeff Bernard will be collecting contact details of interested individuals after some of the Masses this weekend and next. Please, don’t be afraid to check this out!
God bless,
Father Maher
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