A Good Tree Bears Good Fruit

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The Church always seems to tell us to work on yourself before asking those around you to change.  Get your own house in order before you tell others to clean theirs.  Look more deeply at your own situation before you start spending time doing other less important things.  It is very wise advice.  I also remember hearing that you need to go down before you can go up in matters of faith.  You need to understand your own weaknesses before you can start to live in a different way.

The Sermon on the Plain of Luke which we have been hearing for the last two weeks comes to an end today (Luke 6: 39-45) and seems to be asking us what kind of person are we?  In another gospel Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees but here he is speaking to his disciples, you and me.

The first reading says that a person is tested by his language or his conversation.  Is his/her language always about them, is it disciplined, upright, respectful of others?  Like a furnace tests the potter our language, our way of speaking tests us.  Aristotle takes it one step further when he advises don’t watch what people say, pay attention to what they do.  A priest who works a lot with kids had a certain place in his office where he could hear what the youth were talking about below him; from those conversations he knew the real truth about those men.

I asked the eight graders to put one or two of the beatitudes in their own words as an assignment in class last week.  It was a very interesting exercise to see who understood what Christ was saying because if you can put it into your own words then you really own it and not just blindly repeating what you read.

The gospel is telling me that a disciple of Christ is always a disciple; he is not trying to be the rabbi.  He knows that he will always be a learner and not someone who thinks he knows everything.  The meaning of the word disciple is one who is learning.  I would always hope to be only a disciple.  I hope that I never get to the point where I say: enough!

One of the YouTube videos that I stumbled across this week was speaking about a study that was done on Alzheimer’s and seven hundred nuns took part in it when they were all over seventy-five years of age.  The study found that even though their brains showed (after their deaths) all the signs of Alzheimer’s none of them had the symptoms.  They say this is because they were mentally stimulated and had cognitive reserve energy in their brains that were creating new synapses.  Since they were learning new things their brains made new connections that were not clogged with plaque and this helped them to not show any symptoms of the disease.

It ties in very well with what Jesus is saying in this gospel.  Follow the person (or be the person) who is not blind, who knows his weaknesses and knows that his salvation comes from God.  He never gets to the point where he retires, where he or she gives us and life becomes something that I have to endure.  Our heart is like a treasury and you and I are called to fill it with the things of God, not of the world.

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