The Liturgy of the Word:
It’s important to really have an open mind and heart and to really listen to what God wants to say to us throughout the Holy Mass. He speaks most clearly during the Liturgy of the Word.
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The Liturgy of the Word is meant to change us. And it’s meant to empower us to go out from church and change the world. This is why the ministry of reading the Word of God – and cantoring the psalms — is the work of evangelization.
It’s important for us also, in-between readings, to have moments of silence and reflection, to ponder the Word of God. To allow it to touch our hearts and our minds and to change our lives, to heal us, inspire us, and help us grow in holiness.
After the reading of the Scriptures, then comes the homily, which is supposed to be the Word broken open for us, revealing things to ponder, things that can heal us, feed us, change us.
It seems to me that this is such an important opportunity for priests and deacons (the clergy) to make a difference, that it’s a terribly dangerous sin to preach heresy, which does happen all too often, sometimes out of ignorance but usually out of a personal desire to rewrite the Word of God to suit his own view of the how it should be. I describe an example of this in the episode entitled The Suffering Church.
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