When I started this blog, I wanted to get away from current events and focus on Catholic spirituality, especially from a Carmelite point of view. Having recently retired from my day job, I’m hoping to get into more regular writing. In the meantime, we have a homily from Fr. Eduard Perrone, a secular Carmelite and pastor-emeritus at Assumption Grotto in Detroit. It was given on Sunday, July 20, 2025 at the 9:30 a.m. Mass. I asked him if I could post it here. I was delighted that he agreed and sent a copy. Perhaps he will periodically give us more homilies.

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For reference, the readings are from Sunday 16-C. What follows below this line is from Fr. Perrone.

“There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her.”

The Word of God set before us this day concerns the diverse ways we can give service to our God. ‘Service,’ of course, has to do with the work of a slave or a servant, and God has enjoined on us specific commands of religious obligations which are met by the official and public worship rendered to Him in the Mass, and by that ‘service’ we conduct daily in private when we offer our daily prayers and devotions. And there is also the ‘service’ of conducting ourselves in obedience to His moral laws by which we regulate our actions, thoughts and desires, conforming them to a standard He has set. Servitude of this kind, giving God His rightful due in worship, prayer, and the regulation of our manner of living pleases Him and makes us acceptable to Him. We ought then to be dutiful in fulfilling these things which God approves, and which fulfill our purpose for being.

Our Lord’s words to the Mary of this Gospel indicate something in addition to these other services. There is the higher and ‘better’ thing of being at the Lord’s disposition through contemplation–a more passive form of duty, more in the manner of listening to Him rather than acting for Him. Traditionally, we refer to the Active life of the Christian and the Contemplative life, contrasting the two, not however as alternative ways of living, but as complementary, for our Lord did not refuse the holy service Martha rendered to Him, but He specified that there is a more perfect form of service beyond hers, that “better part.” Accordingly, we should not conclude that the contemplative life dispenses us from our active duties towards God. Rather, we should assert that the contemplative life must also to take some place in the life of every Christian in addition to keeping the Commandments and practicing public and private prayer.

Unquestionably, the passivity that characterizes the contemplative life is difficult and rare. Our weakened condition as fallen children of Adam makes it hard for us to be attentive, to keep still, and await in patient silence for God to speak to the heart in that discipline of contemplative prayer. I dare say that it is achieved by only a few since it requires a degree of self-mastery that’s not common among us sinful and easily distracted people. That being said, however, every faithful Catholic needs to have some measure of that prayerful attitude of this Mary who sat beside the Lord at His feet, listening to Him speak. Since our Lord commends the contemplative repose of Mary as ‘the better part’ we must not ignore this higher form of service to Him. Everyone needs to make room in his busy day to go apart, to be alone in quiet and allow his soul to commune with the divine presence. This has become all the more difficult for us due to the anxiety generated by our electronics that nourish our native restlessness. The fact that so many people are losing their peace of soul and are living in fear, having necessary recourse to drugs and therapies is proof that there is something lacking in their lives with something amiss in the soul, that they are suffering from alienation from God. Just as service to God is pleasing to Him and delightful for us, so is the flight from Him a displeasure to Him and a source of misery to us.

I want now to pass suddenly from this subject, so worthy of our thoughts, to another aspect of the Christian life represented in our Scriptures today that’s particularly needful for us in these times. It concerns how we should regard the evils we encounter – not the evils we cause by our sins, but the many others that we meet every day.

The Epistle from Saint Paul proclaims this wonder: the Son of God, having become man, shared our human limitations and frailty, and willed to feel the most acute human suffering, both mental and physical, in His Passion. The ‘wonder’ is further extended in-that He offers us to take a privileged part in what He voluntarily endured. (This is a mystical thing, little appreciated and understood.) If we have the Christian mind to grasp this, we have a divine wisdom which far surpasses what any philosophy can offer us. The evils we inevitably experience in this life can potentially take on a profound significance by making us partners in our Lord’s redemption! No human science could ever have discovered human suffering to have the capacity for this transcendent purpose. To consider suffering only as just retribution for our sins is only a partial and unsatisfying rationale for its existence. Rather, the inescapable evils we suffer can take on a high degree of supernatural worth when they are joined to the Suffering Christ. Listen again to the opening words of the Epistle: “I [Paul] rejoice in my sufferings…and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ.” This, he says, is a ‘completion,’ a mystery that had been hidden in former times, but which has now become known: that there are ‘riches of glory’ to  be found in the Christ who is “in you” (as he says). Christians attain to these ‘riches of glory’ when their sufferings are united to the sufferings of Christ. The evils of this life then are not necessarily negative things of loss and misfortune. God has introduced a way into our encounter with evils so that they can accomplish something most excellent in making us participants in the sufferings of Christ for the salvation of the mankind. He has incorporated us, the suffering members of His mystical body, to share in His supreme sacrifice. (And so there’s no such things as ‘useless’ suffering when we are Christians.)

Our scriptures for today seem to be simple lessons at first hearing, but they contain deep mysteries that should not elude us. They concern the hidden side of our life with Christ: in contemplative prayer, and in suffering. Our Blessed Mother knew these supremely well. And in both of these ways we are involved in the inner life of Her Son, in the deep recesses of His Sacred Heart.

Notes about the painting from Wikimedia Commons