Thanks for joining me, this week we Lectio the Liturgy with the Prayer over the Offering for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time. In this prayer, we ask God to accept, or take and receive, our prayers and offerings. Our desire is the glory of heaven.

Accept, O Lord, the prayers of your faithful with the sacrificial offerings, that, through these acts of devotedness, we may pass over to the glory of heaven. Through Christ our Lord.

Prayer and offering, or sacrifice, is the heart of the Christian life. Prayer is relationship. You may have a list of prayers that you say daily, and that’s good, but it’s not the same as having a conversation with God. If we show up to prayer with our list of favorites, we don’t leave a lot of space to hear what God has to say.

Sacrifice is a part of relationship. Sacrifice is a sign of love. When we love someone, we are willing to give of ourselves out of love for the other. Family life is a perfect example of this. Not only parents, but all members of the family are willing to give of themselves, or of their own desires, out of love for the others in the family. However, we also need to consider how our sacrifice shows our love for God.

In the prayer, our prayer and sacrificial offerings are called acts of devotedness. 

In the Latin form of the prayer, for the word acts, we find the word officia, which refers to the things we do because it’s our job or our responsibility.

The Latin prayer uses two words to describe devotedness, piae devotionis. Piae describes our devotedness as being part of a family, children showing respect to parents and the care of parents to their children. Devotionis means that our acts come from the heart.

Put in English, our acts of devotedness are our prayer and sacrifices that we are do because we are required to do them but we do them out of love. That may seem contradictory because people often rebel when they’re told that they have to do something, but when it comes to devotedness to God, love is the key. We want to pray, we want to be in His house, we want to serve His Church.

Remember, though, that the desire on our hearts is to pass over to the glory of heaven and what we have to offer is our prayer and sacrifice. I don’t know about you but those two things seem pretty easy to fail at. What we need to remember is that we are going to fail. We are going to forget. Sometimes life will get in the way, but remember where you heart is. If the desire of your heart is truly to please God, you won’t be away from him very long. We must also remember that the Father desires to bring us to the glory of heaven. He longs for us to be a part of the family, raising us up to the same glory as his begotten son, Jesus. The Father, as father of our family, longs to see us all back home, but remember, the joys of heaven begin on earth.

Thanks for praying with me,
Julie

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