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Prayer and Pride

October 23, 2016

The entire point of religion is to make us humble before God and to open us to the path of love. Everything else is more or less a footnote. Liturgy, prayer, the precepts of the Church, the commandments, sacraments, sacramental—all of it—are finally meant to conform us to the way of love. When they instead turn us away from that path by devolving into a source of pride and pomposity, they have been undermined. Jesus’ famous parable about the prayers of the pharisee and the tax collector from this Sunday’s readings illustrates precisely this danger of coopting religion for the purposes of our ego.

Mass Readings

Reading 1 – Sirach 35:12-18
Psalm – Psalm 34:2-23
Reading 2 – 2 Timothy 4:6-18
Gospel – Luke 18:9-14