My Family Prayer Book

  2022-Sep-4: Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time   Opening prayer Heavenly Father, send forth your Spirit to enlighten our minds and dispose our hearts to accept your truth. Help us to listen to one another with openness and honesty, eager to learn from the talents and intuitions that you have given each of us. Never let differences of opinion diminish our mutual esteem and love. May we leave this meeting with more knowledge and love for you and your Son. In the unity of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The theme of the  liturgy   The theme is Human limitation in understanding the true purpose of God's divine plan. Wisdom 9:13-18b This passage explains most clearly why humans cannot divine, predict, forecast or even understand what God plans or will do. Put plainly humans cannot fathom God's intentions or plans because humans always see things through the filter of their own limited lives and ultimate death. Thus humans project their worries and temporal concerns upon any qu...

      2022-Jul-31: Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time   Opening prayer Heavenly Father, send forth your Spirit to enlighten our minds and dispose our hearts to accept your truth. Help us to listen to one another with openness and honesty, eager to learn from the talents and intuitions that you have given each of us. Never let differences of opinion diminish our mutual esteem and love. May we leave this meeting with more knowledge and love for you and your Son. In the unity of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Theme of the  liturgy   The path to fulfilment is through God Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:21-23 Ecclesiastes, the collected wisdom of an ancient sage Qoheleth, “the son of David, king in Jerusalem”, who is a man who has seen it all, done it all, tried it all, according to this text, called the “Teacher". He probes the meaning of social values (wealth, possessions, power, fame, scholarship) which run counter to values of God (love your neighbour as an act of faith in God;...

  Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary time Wisdom 7:7-11 Wisdom is the breath of God, the Holy Spirit. Pray for wisdom from God, gift of the Holy Spirit, which lasts longer than any worldly treasures. Psalm 90 Psalm 90 is the only psalm in the psalter recited as a prayer by Moses, the Hebrew in the superscription literally reads “a prayer to Moses, man of God,” on behalf of the people in response to the crisis of exile. It is striking that the pleas to God have an urgency time wise because Moses himself ran out of time, he died before entering the promised land. Reminding us that our human lives are all too fragile and short. For the psalmist, the recognition of human finitude and fallibility is not finally cause for despair, but rather an occasion for prayer.  Hebrew 4:12-13 This reading exhorts those who have received God’s promises in Christ, to persevere in faithful obedience and not make the same mistake that the Exodus generation did. Those who do not continue to live respo...