Father David Rioux's Website

God did not make death, God forms us in His image and likeness, God sustains us in being (Wisdom 1-2).  “But by the envy of the devil,
death entered the world, and they who belong to his company experience it.”

‘Illness, in both the girl and the woman suffering from a hemorrhage, tends towards death, and death imposes itself in all its terrible reality.
Saint Mark (5:21-43) brings us to experience this in his very vivid accounts of these events.
And they help us to listen to Jesus Christ, who is asking us to have faith.
For without faith we cannot understand these miracles, since not only do they lead us to observe that the cure of the woman with a hemorrhage and the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter have taken place, but we must confront the faith option in order to arrive at our own cure and our own resurrection’
(from the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, “The Gospel of Health,” 1996).

‘A great windstorm rose up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was beginning to fill with water.
But Jesus was in the stern, asleep on the cushion.
The disciples woke him and said to Him,
“Do you not care that we are perishing?”
He rose up, and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be stilled.” Then the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
He said to them,
“Why are you afraid?
Do you not yet have faith?”
And they were terribly afraid and said to one another,
“Who is this, that even the wind and sea obey Him?” (Mark 4:35-41)

Jesus Christ demonstrates His Godly nature, His lordship over all creation, as in our Psalm (107): He hushes the storm to a gentle breeze, the billows of the sea are stilled…

When God created heaven and earth, and all to be good, very good.
God rests, and God blesses and hallows the seventh day for us (Genesis 1-2).

But God never abandons us to ourselves.
At every moment, God upholds us and sustains us in being (Catechism of the Catholic Church § 301).

God rests in caring for us.

This Lord’s Day Word compares the Kingdom of God to the mustard seed (Mark 4:26-35).
The seed figures in Christ’s teaching disciples who ask, ‘increase our faith’ (Luke 17:5-10).
“If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:14-20).

G. K. Chesterton’s poem The Holy of Holies asks, ‘what is in the heart of the smallest of seeds?’

God Almighty, and with Him
Cherubim and Seraphim,
Filling all eternity—
Adonai Elohim.

Our recent Solemnity of Corpus Christi celebrated the Mystery that the tiniest grain of consecrated bread becomes the whole Body of Christ, and each person in Holy Communion receives the whole Body of Christ.

Psalm 92 tells us how to receive and realize the potential of this Grace that Christ offers us, to build up the Kingdom of God, with nothing impossible for us. If we faithfully nurture the seed of the Word, ‘the righteous shall flourish, in the courts of our God.’