Keep going

For many people, religion helps give stability to their lives amidst a chaotic world.

To be sure, faith is a great source of comfort and Scripture tells us in many places that God can be a rock, an unshakeable foundation for our lives. There are even those who take a vow of stability, committing themselves to never leaving the particular monastery they have joined.

But there is also a kind of stability that is deadly to a life of faith: a stability based on the idea that we have already attained perfection, that we do not need to grow anymore.

No matter how spiritually, intellectually, and morally advanced we may be, we are not in heaven and we do not have the fullness of the beatific vision.

We still have room to grow and a long way to go.

And so, God continually calls us to grow and gives us the grace to develop more fully and deeply in him.

However, if we choose to reject God's call to grow, imagining that we can just stick with the way we are, we take a terribly deadly risk.

In today's Gospel (Mark 3:1-6), our Lord tries to reason with the Pharisees, to lead them into a fuller understanding of God’s grace and action in the lives of men, but the Pharisees would not respond.

Our Lord, the Gospel says, looked "around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart."

We need to let our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ more and more fully into our lives, submit ourselves more and more completely to his will, and seek to understand more and more deeply the mysteries of his truth and love.