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22 September Catholic Mass Daily Bible Reading. USCCB. Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 8,19-21. The mother of Jesus and his brothers came to him but were unable to join him because …More
22 September Catholic Mass Daily Bible Reading.

USCCB. Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 8,19-21.
The mother of Jesus and his brothers came to him but were unable to join him because of the crowd.
He was told, "Your mother and your brothers are standing outside and they wish to see you."
He said to them in reply, "My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it."

Copyright © Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, USCCB

Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964)
missionary to the down-and-outs
The Book of the Lord (from: The Joy of Believing, rev.)


The Book of Life
The gospel is the book of the Lord's life. It is made to become the book of our own lives.
It isn't made to be understood but to be approached like a threshold to mystery.
It isn't made to be read but to be taken into ourselves.
Each one of its words is spirit and life. Active and free, they are only waiting for the eagerness of our souls in order to stream out towards them. Alive, they themselves are like the initial leaven that will work on our dough and make it ferment with a kind of new life. (…)
The words of the gospel are miraculous. They don't transform us because we don't ask them to transform us. But in every sentence of Jesus, in each one of his examples, lives the meteoric virtue that healed, purified, brought back to life. On condition that we are like, with respect to him, the paralytic or the centurion; that we act promptly in full obedience. (…)
What will assist us will be to bear, to "guard" within ourselves, in the warmth of our faith and our hope, the word to which we wish to show obedience. It will establish a sort of bond of life. between itself and our wills.
When we take our gospels into our hands, we should think how within them dwells the Word who wills to become flesh in us, to take possession of us, so that with his heart grafted onto our own, his spirit connected to our spirits,, we shall take up his life again in another place, another time, another human society.
To deepen the gospel in this way is to renounce our own lives to receive a destiny that has Christ as its only shape.