Saturday of the 18th Week
in Ordinary Time
Memorial of Saint Dominic
August 8, 2015 8:30am
“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our
God, the Lord alone.”
These words are the beginning of
our first reading today.
This verse is maybe the most
significant in the entire Old Testament.
It is known as the Shema Yisrael.
The Shema is the first prayer a Jewish child learns.
It is also the last prayer that a
dying Jew would pray.
Traditionally, it is the first
prayer that Jews would pray in the morning and the last prayer they would pray
at night.
In its origin, it is a prayer of
praise to God who led Israel during the Exodus.
It is also an act of faith that
God continues to care for his people.
This prayer is centered on the
idea of one – of one God.
There is one God.
We are not, in effect, to make
gods of other persons or of things.
This prayer also expresses the
truth that the one God has created all of humanity.
So we are to regard all persons,
all of humanity as part of one family.
And this prayer expresses the
truth that the one God has created all of creation.
So we are to respect each part of
creation as one work of the one God.
To put it briefly, this oneness
created by the one God is to be part of our consciousness.
It is to affect all that we do.
We are not to compartmentalize or
segment any aspect of our lives from this great, fundamental truth.
All of this comes or derived from
the watershed prayer in the Old Testament:
“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our
God, the Lord alone.”
