Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
St. Paul challenges us to today “Do not be haughty but associate with the lowly.” Jesus’s famous parable about the dinner guests urges us to the same interior state: to associate with the lowly and to reject any notion of being haughty.
One way to be haughty in our lives is to disdain others. Disdain flows from an attitude of dismissal of others or superiority of self. Disdain can creep into our hearts sometimes without even noticing it but can poison our relationships and our spiritual lives if we do not root it out. Where might disdain might be present in your heart and how might Christ be calling you to root it out?
St. Paul offers us a way of combating disdain: service and gratitude. By being grateful for the gifts that we have been blessed with by God and using them in the service of our neighbors we directly combat disdain because we do not seek to inflate our sense of self, but instead seek to love and serve our neighbor. If we discover in our hearts the poison of disdain, how might we combat it through gratitude and service?
Christ disdains no one in His body, let us pray to cultivate this attitude in us this day.