Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS)'s Podcast
The Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS) is a centre for research and formation that promotes spiritual formation and renewal, drawing on the rich resources of the venerable Carmelite tradition.
It is an apostolate of the Anglo-Irish Province of the Discalced Carmelites, based at the Carmelite Priory at Boars Hill, Oxford, England.
OUR MISSION
CACS strives to achieve its mission through structured study and formation programmes in spirituality from the Carmelite perspective, especially Prayer and Spiritual Direction. At the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality, you are welcome to enter into the silence where God’s voice is heard in prayer, word and sacrament, inviting you to journey ever more deeply into a place of growth and wholeness. Our goal is to bring people to experience a life-transforming friendship with God through a lived experience of Carmelite spirituality that is authentic to its biblical roots.
Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS)'s Podcast
Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Word & Wisdom is a weekly reflection on the Sunday’s scriptures and the wisdom of the Carmelite tradition. It promises to offer you real spiritual food to sustain you on the journey.
This Word and Wisdom Podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality, Oxford (carmelite.uk.net).
To receive audio and written copies, subscribe by emailing podcasts@cacs.org.uk
To connect with our Living Prayer Podcast on Youtube, kindly click: https://www.youtube.com/@CACSOxford
The Liturgy for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time presents a stark and uncomfortable truth, a great chasm can form between ourselves and God, not necessarily through overt malice, but through the narcotic of comfort. The readings today diagnose a spiritual ailment of our time and all times, a deafness to the Word of God and a blindness to the suffering of our neighbour, induced by a life of calculated ease and material satisfaction. The prophet Amos and the Gospel of Luke speak with a unified, resounding voice against those at ease in Zion.
Amos condemns the leaders of Israel who, comfortable on their beds of ivory, have become uninterested in the safety of their land, ignoring the ruin of Joseph. This is not merely a political failure, but a spiritual one, rooted in pride and a distortion of justice. The rich man in Luke's Gospel gives this complacency a face, clothed in purple and fine linen.
He isn't depicted as actively cruel to Lazarus, the poor man at his gate. He is simply indifferent. Lazarus is invisible to him, less real than the dogs that lick his sores.
This damning indifference is the heart of the sin. The chasm that separates them in the afterlife is not a sudden divine punishment, but the terrible, eternal confirmation of a distance the rich man himself created on earth through his self-imposed blindness. How does one fall into such a state? A distortion of justice that presents right living as distasteful, evil, and harmful.
It is a conscious choice to prioritise personal satisfaction over our baptismal commitment to others. The bane of prosperity gospel is that one comes to love the gifts of God more than the giver, finding security in the spiritual sweets rather than in God himself. This spiritual gluttony makes one incapable of seeing Christ in the suffering at the gate and the fringes of our society because all senses are turned inward, feasting on self-satisfaction.
Even in torment, the rich man's blindness persists. He still sees Lazarus not as a brother, but as a utility and instrument to serve his needs. The path away from this perilous comfort is one of active pursuit and profound humility.
St. Paul's exhortation to Timothy to pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness, is the antidote. God desires that we truly know Him as both just and merciful, preferring mercy to insensitivity and wickedness, truth to intentional error or distortion of the truth, and developing a close bond with the Lord Himself by daily personal spiritual reading and prayers. This requires a radical faith, a willingness to be continually challenged and transformed by the Word.
St. Teresa teaches that to be humble is to walk in truth. It is the rejection of the pride that fuelled the injustices in Amos' time. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity goes further, stating, to be plunged into humility is to be plunged into God.
This is the very opposite of the rich man's life. He was plunged into comfort and thus exiled from God. Lazarus, stripped of everything, had nothing left but trust.
His prayer is that of the psalmist who, feeling oppressed, hungry, and imprisoned, still cries out in naked faith, my soul, give praise to the Lord. Ultimately, the readings call us to rely not on signs, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead, but on the quiet, persistent call of God found in Scripture and in the person of the poor. God's mercy, as the opening prayer of the liturgy reminds us, is His greatest power.
It invites us to leave our sumptuous feasts and choose a holy poverty, so that we may finally see the Lazarus at our gate and, in Him, find the God who alone can fill the chasm of our hearts.