What are you Willing to Cry for?: Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 2025

                                           What are you Willing to Cry for?:

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 2025 

October 5, 2025

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Habakkuk 1:2-3, 2:2-4; Psalm 95; 2 Timothy 1:6-14; Luke 17:5-10

 

These prophet Habakkuk puts forth the Job-like question: How long, O Lord? Why are you not listening to me? I cry out to you and violence and fear are all around, and you remain silent. You do nothing. Why do you not intervene? Why do you let my suffering be prolonged, and you compel me look at my misery. What sort of a God are you? If you, O God, cared for me, you would not leave me without answers.

 

          It is far easier and more comfortable for us today to get angry and express outrage at world events as we confront our perceived powerlessness. We may say crude things or shout out microaggressions because we are not ready to look at our pain, yet the invitation is to go deeper, to look at the gravity of our pain, and listen to what it is trying to tell us. We realize words do not capture all that we are experiencing, which is a reason we use vulgar or violent words. The invitation is to know what the pain is trying to teach us. Sighs, groanings, and tears are powerful communicators. 

 

          Richard Rohr in his book, The Tears of Things, writes that tears soften us when anger hardens our hearts. Our tears keep us connected to our humanity. Anger, guilt, and shame are designed to confound us and to keep us off balance. Ask someone why she is angry and you’ll get an earful. Ask someone why he is crying and you will get a clearn answer promptly. Tears point the direction forward because they always respect and honor the truth. Understanding what the tears teach us brings great clarity and a direction forward. Tears allow you to respond with compassion rather than despair and it enables you to hold someone else’s pain without trying to fix it or control it. Tears do not let you avoid it, and it often brings someone else into your suffering. Another person can be present to you with care. 

 

          The question that comes to mind is: What are you willing to cry for? What will you let move your heart to greater compassion and empathy? We need the ability to feel deeply and to express our pain without shame. It means that we are willing to pause and to feel our situation with profound respect. Our pain invites in another person to be present to us and to let their heart be softened by love. That person can accompany us without offering advice, by proverbially holding our hands when we are in pain.

 

          This allows the message of the Gospel to take effect. If you had increased faith, you would be able to bear your sorrow well. Well, great faith is over-rated. We need a small faith with a great, big God. We need a God who will sit with us in our pain and learn of our grief. We need a God who will coax us to go deeper into our emotions so that our tears can clarify where and how we hurt. We need a God who knows and understands a broken heart because God lives eternally with one. God’s presence, or the presence of a loved one, will open us up instead of shutting us down. It is about letting our hearts be softened by love, to be weak enough to cry, to be vulnerable enough to be real. Your tears may be your greatest strength. Your tears are sacred. What are you willing to cry for? For whom? When we stop trying to escape the pain and hold it with grace, we see that empathy turns our tears into transformation. Our tears give us hope, a direction, a vision, a purpose. Our tears have tremendous power. 

 

Scripture for Daily Mass

Monday: (Jonah 1) "Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it; their wickedness has come up before me." But Jonah made ready to flee to Tarshish away from the LORD.

 

Tuesday: (Jonah 3) "Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and announce to it the message that I will tell you." So Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh, according to the LORD's bidding.

 

Wednesday: (Jonah 4) Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry that God did not carry out the evil he threatened against Nineveh. He prayed, "I beseech you, LORD, is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?

 

Thursday: (Malachi 3) For lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven, when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble, And the day that is coming will set them on fire,
leaving them neither root nor branch.

 

Friday (Joel 1) Proclaim a fast, call an assembly; Gather the elders, all who dwell in the land, Into the house of the LORD, your God, and cry to the LORD!

 

Saturday (Joel 4) Apply the sickle, for the harvest is ripe; Come and tread, for the wine press is full; The vats overflow, for great is their malice.

 

Gospel: 

Monday: (Luke 10) "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" He said in reply, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."

 

Tuesday: (Luke 11) Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.

 

Wednesday (Luke 11) Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples."

 

Thursday (Luke 11) "Suppose one of you has a friend to whom he goes at midnight and says, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived at my house from a journey and I have nothing to offer him,'

 

Friday (Luke 11) When Jesus had driven out a demon, some of the crowd said: “By the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, he drives out demons.” Others, to test him, asked him for a sign from heaven.

 

Saturday (Luke 11) "Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed." He replied, "Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it."

 

Saints of the Week

 

October 6: Bruno, priest (1030-1101), became a professor at Rheims and diocesan chancellor. He gave up his riches and began to live as a hermit with six other men. They had disdain for the rampant clerical corruption. The bishop of Grenoble gave them land in the Chartreuse mountains and they began the first Carthusian monastery. After serving in Rome for a few years, Bruno was given permission to found a second monastery in Calabria.

 

October 7: Our Lady of the Rosary recalls the events in 1571 of the Christian naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto near Corinth. Victory was credited to Mary as confraternities prayed the rosary for her intercession. 

 

October 9: Denis, bishop and martyr, and companion martyrs (d. 258), was the first bishop of Paris. He died during the Decian persecutions by beheading at Montmarte, the highest hill in the city. Lore has it that he picked up his head after the beheading and walked six miles while giving a sermon. Denis was sent to Paris to bring Christianity and was thereby called, “The apostle to the Gauls.”

 

October 9: John Leonardi (1542-1609), was a pharmacist’s assistant before studying for the priesthood. He became interested in the reforms of the Council of Trent and gathered laymen around him to work in prisons and hospitals. He contracted the plague while ministering to those who were sick. He founded the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God to care for the sick.

 

This Week in Jesuit History

 

• October 5, 1981. In a letter to Father General Arrupe, Pope John Paul II appointed Paolo Dezza as his personal delegate to govern the Society of Jesus, with Fr. Pittau as coadjutor. 
• October 6, 1773. In London, Dr James Talbot, the Vicar Apostolic, promulgated the Brief of Suppression and sent copies to Maryland and Pennsylvania. 
• October 7, 1819. The death of Charles Emmanuel IV. He had been King of Sardinia and Piedmont. He abdicated in 1802 and entered the Jesuits as a brother in 1815. He is buried in San Andrea Quirinale in Rome. 
• October 8, 1871. The Great Chicago Fire. Most of the city was destroyed, but it missed Holy Family, the Jesuit parish, as the fire turned north thanks to the prayers of Fr. Arnold Damen. The fire lasted three days; 250 were killed. 
• October 9, 1627. Jansenius left Louvain for Salamanca to foment antipathy against the Jesuits and thus prevent Philip IV from giving the Society a large college in Madrid. The theological faculty at Salamanca were hostile to the Society. 
• October 10, 1806: The first novitiate of the Maryland Mission opened as ten novices began their Long Retreat under the direction of Fr. Francis Neale (himself a novice who had entered the Jesuits that day.) 
• October 11, 1688: King Louis XIV forbade all correspondence and interchange between the French Jesuits and Fr. Thyrsus Gonzalez, the Spanish General Superior of the Society.