Prayer : God of Autumn . . .

 May you be blessed by the God of Autumn who opens your eyes to the glorious colors of tree and bush and sky. May your heart be open to the colors of God's love and care for you. May you learn the lesson of letting go into God's desire for you. May you be a companion to those who are in the autumn of life and may your own changing years be filled with the glow of God's glory. May the blessing of Autumn be yours. --Maxine Shonk, OP

Reflection: 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

VIDEO:  https://www.catholicwomenpreach.org/preaching/09202026#w-tabs-0-data-w-pane-1

September 20, 2026

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Nóirin

Lynch

Anthony De Mello tells a story about a small farmer who realized he had a field that he wasn’t using or minding well.  So, after some thought, he put up a sign in the field that read ‘this field will be given to the one who is completely satisfied’. People stopped as they passed, excited about the opportunity. Then they would shake their heads and realize they weren’t satisfied and so couldn’t have it.

Eventually the richest person in the area drove up to the door of the small farmer, in a car worth more than the annual income of most. Stepping out he declared, I am the richest man in this area. I own everything with no debt and have a house paid for, for every child of mine. I am retired and enjoying the spoils of my hard work with family. On reflection is it clear to me that I am completely satisfied, and so I have come to claim this field which I can and will use well’.

The small farmer looked at him with soft eyes and said, ‘Ah, my friend, you have done very well, better than most of us. Permit me to ask though: if you are completely satisfied – why do you want the field?’

You and I are good people who trust in God for the most part. We trust in God for daily life, for our pension and retirement and for whatever comes after that – don’t we? We trust in God to treat us justly and to mind us well so that we can rest in the Lord’s love – don’t we?  

So why is it that when we see others do well, some little niggle moves through some of us and we find ourselves wondering why ‘they’ are doing well, compared to us (who perhaps we thought might do better). Oh, we berate ourselves for even thinking it, but it arises.

We see it in family – I don’t want to be jealous of how well my siblings or cousins are doing, but it niggles.

We see it in communities – I want others to be treated well, but I deserve those tax breaks first, just as a matter of fairness and then I will volunteer/donate.  

We see it in borders – I love everyone, once they’re legal cause I did it right, so why shouldn’t they? (did you, did you really? lol)

We see it internationally – you can’t expect us to prop up other countries, in health care, disease control, climate emergencies - even when it’s clear all we have here is based on how we plundered (still plunder?) other countries. But that wasn’t us personally, so we shouldn’t suffer for that?!?

We are nice people, we deserve nice things. We donate, we tithe, we are kind. We are satisfied with our lot. Until we see what others have, perhaps? We trust God and we really want to be satisfied that God will bless us always.

So why the niggle? Why the need to keep an eye on what the neighbor is getting?

Now before we beat ourselves up, let’s be prayerful and kind about this. This is a wound in us. It’s not just plain greed, it’s often really fear, isn’t it.

For most of us, we began life utterly confident of love. Somehow, somewhere, we got hurt. Wounded. And now we believe – somewhere deep inside - that if we share, we will get hurt again. So, we keep an eye on what the neighbor/sibling/country is getting and we wonder what that says about our value, our worth, about whether we are really loved and loveable or not.

We are not completely satisfied, and that’s the way many of us enter into the second or final part of life. The part that’s all about letting go and surrendering into the love of God who will mind you.

So, today's gospel is written specifically about many of us and for many of us. The ones who are doing ok but are nervous of others doing well.

The nice thing is that Jesus recognized this quality in many, so we’re not uniquely sinful. We’re human!!

This week’s readings call us to three things

-       To seek out God honestly, bringing ourselves just as we are, to be loved

-       To trust that God is not a relationship to be earned, but that God is already near to all who seek God – so God is with you, and not some future earning or not dependent on how much love God has left over after loving everyone equally!

-       To let go of the comparison and the fear of being underpaid in comparison to others. The fear of being under loved, under appreciated

Mary Oliver wrote:

To live in this world
you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones
knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go

The first letting go for us this week might be noticing and letting go of the fear that others are doing better than us. It really doesn’t matter; it’s just comparisons in a consumer/capitalist world. Let it go. Trust in God’s love. Bring the struggle with that to God in prayer.  

The bigger letting go might be over the years ahead – noticing and letting go of the fear that God couldn’t possibly really love us totally, not if God knew us. Catching the places where we insist God must be mad at us, healing the fears of being unworthy. Until we reach a moment, a nirvana, where we accept that we are truly beloved, and can rest completely satisfied into the arms of God.

Sounds like Heaven, doesn’t it! Heaven on earth.

Nóirin Lynch

Nóirin Lynch lives in Co Clare in Ireland where she is Director of the FCJ Spirituality House in Spanish Point, an Ignatian retreat centre, one field off the Atlantic.  

Nóirin was born in Limerick city and has been involved in pastoral ministry since 1992. Youth ministry, school chaplaincy, and service as a parish pastoral work for the English-speaking community in Munich, Germany, filled her early years until she returned to Ireland in 2001 to work in Kerry, Limerick and Cork & Ross dioceses as support for parishes and parish teams. For the last 8 years Nóirin has worked with religious sisters in Dublin and Limerick as director of retreat centres, offering spaces apart for spiritual seekers.  

In her spare time Nóirin is a singer-songwriter who has hosted singing circles across the island and created 2 CDs of Irish Folk music. She loves listening to, and learning from, those who carry songs and stories from small local communities, and she believes deeply that their wisdom is both healing and inspiring for us all.  

A Prayer of Sorrows . . .

 

A Contemporary Prayer to Our Lady of Sorrows

Holy Mary, Mother of Sorrows,
You walked a path marked by deep grief, systemic injustice, and profound love. You know the weight of a breaking heart, the terror of fleeing your home, and the agony of watching your child suffer at the hands of violent powers.

Today, we bring the sorrows of our world to you. We stand in solidarity with all who weep, all who resist, and all who carry heavy burdens in silence.

We pray for mothers who grieve the loss of children to violence, war, poverty, and addiction. Comfort them in their unceasing ache.
We pray for women fleeing their homelands as refugees, carrying their families into the unknown. Grant them safety and welcoming shores.
We pray for those who suffer under the weight of oppression, discrimination, and abuse. Give them fierce courage, and break the systems that bind them.
We pray for the lonely, the forgotten, and those who carry the hidden sorrows of mental illness, chronic pain, or broken relationships. Wrap them in your tender embrace.

Mary, you did not let sorrow paralyze you. You stood resilient at the foot of the cross, witnessing to love even in the darkest hour. Teach us that same fierce resilience.

Transform our grief into action. Kindle within us a holy anger against injustice, and a boundless compassion for the suffering. Help us to stand with one another in our sorrows, so that together, we may birth a world of healing, peace, and resurrection.

Amen.

Author Unknown

In Praise of Autumn . . .

 

 

In the stillness of an autumn afternoon
we sit in quiet communion. Before us,
hills and valleys yawn, spreading wide
their yellow and green, ochre and gold
harvest of hay, beans and corn.

All summer long these fields drank
daily offerings of dew and sunlight.
We listen to the hush of hills, a hawk
above us riding thermal winds,
the drying corn nearby whispering
Praise! Praise! Praise!, the grass
beneath our squeaking swing
chanting, sotto voce, Thank you, God.

Everything around us whispers shhh.
And when we do, we hear the holy
breath of God bringing forth the world.

 

 Poem by: Sister Irene Zimmerman, SSSF

 

 

A Sacred Season . . .

 

   A Leaf Treader

I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn-tired.
God knows all the color and form of leaves I have trodden on and mired.
Perhaps I have put forth too much strength and been too fierce from fear.
I have safely trodden underfoot the leaves of another year.

All summer long they were overhead, more lifted up than I.
To come to their final place in earth they had to pass me by.
All summer long I thought I heard them threatening under their breath.
And when they came it seemed with a will to carry me with them to death.

They spoke to the fugitive in my heart as if it were leaf to leaf.
They tapped at my eyelids and touched my lips with an invitation to grief.
But it was no reason I had to go because they had to go.
Now up my knee to keep on top of another year of snow.

Robert Frost, A Further Range (1936).

Prayer of Autumn Equinox . . .

 O sacred season of Autumn, be my teacher,

for I wish to  learn the virtue of contentment.
As I gaze upon your full-colored beauty,
I sense all about you
an at-homeness with your amber riches.

You are the season of retirement,
of full barns and harvested fields.
The cycle of growth has ceased,
and the busy work of giving life
is now completed.
I sense in you no regrets:
you’ve lived a full life.

I live in a society that is ever-restless,
always eager for more mountains to climb,
seeking happiness through more and more possessions.
As a child of my culture,
I am seldom truly at peace with what I have.
Teach me to take stock of what I have given and received,
may I know that it’s enough,
that my striving can cease
in the abundance of Life’s grace.
May I know the contentment
that allows the totality of my energies
to come to full flower.
May I know that like you I am rich beyond measure.

As you, O Autumn, take pleasure in your great bounty,
let me also take delight
in the abundance of the simple things in life
which are the true source of joy.
With the golden glow of peaceful contentment
may I truly appreciate this autumn day.

Ed Hays

Reflection: Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 https://www.catholicwomenpreach.org/preaching/09132026

Erin Lothes, Ph.D., is the executive director of Bethan
y Center Hudson Valley, an ecological education center in New York. She is author of Inspired Sustainability: Planting Seeds for Action (Orbis 2016) and The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice:The Loss of Self, The Gift of Self (Herder and Herder, 2007), as well as many articles on faith-based environmentalism and energy ethics and a commentary for the Orbis Books publication of Pope Francis’s Laudate Deum.  

Dr. Lothes was a tenured associate professor of theology at St. Elizabeth’s University, until resigning to lead the Laudato Si Animators Program with the Laudato Si Movement. She has been a long-time collaborator and divestment activist with many interfaith environmental coalitions such as GreenFaith, the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, and the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, where she is presently a visiting scholar. She is also an ecclesial affiliate with the Laudato Si Research Institute, Campion Hall at Oxford University

September 13, 2026

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Erin

Lothes

Today’s readings bluntly acknowledge the pain of anger and our need for forgiveness. But are there times anger is needed?

Sins and ecological degradation has been linked by our Popes, bishops, and theologians, perhaps first named by the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, but what truly is our own complicity?

Not primarily the small actions of excess waste, or failed recycling, or use of fossil fuels in driving. We know that personal small actions matter and create the habit of virtue to do more.  But the reality, as Pope Francis clearly names in Laudato Deum, is of persistent deception and greenwashing by industry, financial and governmental leaders.

And in response to this we do need to stay angry- with the clarity to identify the real sinner: the persistent structures of unrepentant polluting industries. We are called, through our commitment to health, to love, to life, to advocate – to raise a voice of anger against these systems.

Our Church clearly teaches our obligation to care for our common home through rapid and large scale change.  As Pope Francis declared in Laudato Si,

We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay. …. Politics and business have been slow to react in a way commensurate with the urgency of the challenges facing our world.” (Laudato Si’ 165).

Our response is not simply a political advocacy response, but a deeply spiritual response to a cultural crisis engendered by entrenched enemies- and we have to be comfortable with this term, as was Jesus, who spoke of enemies quite directly. So does Pope Francis, using the term “assault.” He writes in Laudate Deum:

“the ecological conversion and an educational program, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm” characterize our response.

Thus we can seek pardon from the desperate task of personal environmental purity and the futile (and antagonizing) moral zealotry of seeking perfect lifestyle sustainability. Instead, it challenges and empowers climate disciples to be organized just as intelligently as the polluting industries and to forge our alliances across the intersectionalities of injustice and enact the new transition. Thus, sent forth, climate disciples are challenged to speak truth to power and expose the lie of greenwashing and the shame of the personal carbon footprint invented by fossil fuel companies to gaslight the modern world.

We see and feel the impacts of the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis.  We hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. Yet God has guided God’s family through the desert before.  With the problems of today, as serious and even frightening as they are, our fundamental faith response is one of trust. We can turn to God our Creator in trust and pray that the individual ways we may have failed to care for the earth, but much more the greater industrial polluting systems we struggle to dismantle, will not have permanently destructive impact and God will put these transgressions behind us.  

The Psalm for today honors God’s forgiving kindness.

The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.
He pardons all your iniquities,
heals all your ills.
He redeems your life from destruction,
crowns you with kindness and compassion.

Through this fundamental trust, we let God be Creator, truly “Lord of both the dead and the living” (Romans 14).