Thursday of the Second Week of Advent
December 13, 2007
"From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence."
- Matthew 11:13

Have you ever seen a fight break out? Remember the thoughts and feelings as you saw the people physically attacking each other. The TV, movies and media are full of fighting and war. The animalistic way we can treat a fellow child of God is appalling. Physical violence, sadly, is way too commonplace.

But what of other kinds of violence? In the Ten Commandments we read that we are not to kill. We know we are not supposed to physically kill another human being but there are many ways we can kill. What are the other ways of killing that are not so obvious because it is not human beings hitting, shooting or bombing each other?

We can kill people with our negative and cruel words. If you keep telling a child they are "dumb", "ugly", or "a loser" they can begin to believe that as the truth. How much violence to people's images has happened and how many people have taken their own lives because of our cruel and condemning words? Please be convicted that we can do much violence and killing with our speech.

The violence of our actions and words comes from the violence of our thoughts. If we have violence in out thoughts this points to the fact of an absence of God's grace working in those areas of our lives. Thus we turn to God's saving grace and ask him to change our violence into the way of compassion. All of this can only happen by being in union with the one who never threatens violence.

The greatest violence is not to be in a sacred friendship with Christ and not sharing that friendship with all we meet. The greatest violence we do to ourselves is not be to in relationship with Jesus Christ who leads us out of the cruelty of violence into His saving way of love. And the greatest violence we do to others is to withhold from them our knowledge about the Prince of Peace who has come to put an end to all violence.

Let us pray, "Jesus, you are the Prince of Peace. Please reveal to me all the ways I choose violence over your saving way of love. I believe and know you have come to put an end to violence on this earth. May your Kingdom come, may your will be done and may your peace be on earth. May I seek you, speak you and live your way for peace. I cannot bring your peace to the whole world but I can bring it where I am at and it is for this I pray. Amen."

We are infinitely blessed!

+ Fr. John