Tuesday of
the 6th Week in Ordinary Time
February 18, 2014 8:30am
Tuesday of the 6th Week in Ordinary Time
February 18, 2014 8:30am
Our first readings beginning with
yesterday’s Mass are from the Letter of Saint James.
In these opening verses, James
talks of perseverance.
Yesterday, he says: “Let perseverance be perfect, so that you
may be perfect and complete.”
Today James says: “Blessed is he who perseveres in
temptation.”
Perseverance may not be an easy
trait in our culture.
We are used to instant
gratification, quick results, and easy solutions.
To persevere means putting up
with some stuff we don’t like.
It means hanging in there to
accomplish something.
All of this can be difficult in our
culture.
But, this kind of perseverance is
needed for us to become whole and holy persons, as James says.
As I see it, we need perseverance
for two reasons.
First, we change and grow slowly.
That is simply a fact of human
life.
We may, for example, want to get
hold of our habit of talking about others or our impatience or whatever the habit
may be.
But we have to keep working on it
and allowing the Lord to work in us for us to grow out of that and most often
that takes a long time.
We also need perseverance because
sometimes we are acting out of past experiences that we may not even know are
influencing us.
It may take time to discern, for
example, past hurts that have affected us and affected how we view and react to
things.
Sometimes we need the wise
counsel of another to even be aware of this.
And then we need time to grow
through this.
So, perseverance is a virtue that
James lifts up in this opening chapter of his letter and it is a virtue that we
definitely need in our culture today.
