24 & 25 January 2026, 3rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Spiritual maintenance in a time of trouble
“The people who have walked in darkness” has a certain poignancy for us, sitting in the dark after another electricity malfunction in the city. There are theories about it being the result of vandalism, and this is a theory that is worth entertaining – though not for long, I suppose. It doesn’t seem to tell the full story. At the heart of the present difficulty is more than likely a lack of diligent maintenance, simple neglect, of the power infrastructure. And while the neglect is gradual, spanning decades, the disaster that follows is sudden, with widespread effects.
Is this something of what happened to those cities called the “Galilee of the nations”, Zebulun and Naphtali?
These cities lay on the northern coast of Israel, part of the trade region of the Holy Land. Apart from the commerce in things, though, it became a port of ideas, practices and foreign religions too. Attempting to be too multicultural, what eventually ensued – as so often happened in the Levant – was a catastrophic melange of worldviews and religious ideas. The people abandoned the certain faith in the One True God, that precursor of the One True Church, for a pluralistic, syncretic, relativistic, semi-pagan religion that was the work of man’s mind, rather than the will of God. They abandoned God, Who had united Himself to them in covenant. We could say that, being distracted by other things – trade, ideology and idolatry – they neglected their spiritual maintenance. And what was the result? Destruction. Zebulun and Naphtali were the first cities to be routed by the Assyrians; the rich and skilled were deported as political exiles; the poor were scattered, far from Jerusalem, embedded in the darkness of paganism and irreligion. They neglected the truth and found themselves in trouble.
If this was the end of the story, it would be an awful tale. And yet the Prophet Isaiah offers them a vision of hope: these people who had abandoned God, failing to maintain their spiritual lives, who lived in the darkness of having turned from the Lord, would one day see the light again. God, Whose love is faithful, would visit His people and redeem them. In the fullness of time, then, when the Word was made flesh – in Jesus – the Light of the World goes to visit this land of neglect and darkness, and brings His Own light to it. Even this place of neglect and sorrow would not now be neglected by God, Whose love can bring restoration and healing. Our Lord not only passes through, but He stays for a moment, proclaims the Good News, anoints the land with His very presence, and fulfils the prophecy heard so long ago. God has not abandoned the people who abandoned Him.
It’s not the people or the place who bring about this restoration; the Lord is their light and salvation. It is He Who begins this good work, and brings it to completion. And so too for us: every good desire we have, every resolution we make, is a call to God to make His perfect will manifest in our lives. God, Who is ever-faithful, will do this good work for, and in, us.
So near to the start of the year, in which our annual resolutions may need some attention again, we could ask if our spiritual lives need a bit of maintenance again too. Without careful attention, our spiritual lives could become places deprived of God’s illumination, leaving us in the dark. Let’s commit, then, even now, to a little programme of spiritual maintenance, allowing the Lord to work in us.
- Give first place to the interior life
With the return to work and our normal duties, it can be so easy to neglect our interior life. We are busied by work and its demands, and the fulfilment of many exterior duties, which bring exhaustion by day-end. This often becomes a primary pursuit for us – and so the same for our household chores, or our studies; these things consume us, taking the best of our energy and time. And, yet, what is more pressing and primary, is our interior life: daily prayer, frequent and regular, can be so easily postponed, truncated or cancelled in favour of the “external” goods. Without it, though, all that we do loses its potency, being less good than it could be if it were built on the luminous foundation of a relationship with the Lord. If we want to begin a programme of spiritual renewal, we must again prioritise the interior life. With this comes a radical recommitment to frequent confession, following a good examination of conscience, recognising this sacrament as a Divine precept – it is God Who desires that we go to confession often, and receive the healing He has designed in it for our salvation. We could also, on this “Sunday of the Word of God”, make a renewed commitment to reading Sacred Scripture, encountering the Lord in the inspired pages, and letting the One Who visits Zebulun and Naphtali visit us in our neglect, too. And what He achieves in those lands, bringing light and healing, He wills to perform in our souls also. To this programme of Scripture, we should not fail to add good spiritual reading, which helps the heart to assimilate the truth under the tutorship of reliable guides; St Philip was fond of recalling that we should read books written by authors whose names began with “S” – St Augustine, St Bernard, and so on. A little bit of spiritual reading can bring great maintenance to the soul; it can make us saints.
A reprioritising of the interior life will bring choices and sacrifices; we rejoice that we can choose the Lord over any worldly good! It may be difficult, but it will be worth it – not only now, but in heaven.
- In the marketplace of ideas, choose the truth
Apart from our spiritual reading, which is essential and important, we should do our best to give some priority also to the intellectual life, especially in a world that trades many false and harmful ideologies today. Here, this reading is not so much an act of prayer – as spiritual reading should be – but rather one of careful study, engaging the mind that has first been touched by grace. (Naturally, every work of study is consecrated to God through prayer; no meaningful period of learning is completed removed from prayer.) Reading good books, we try to make concrete again those truths that are indispensable for our salvation; we reject all that is at odds with the Gospel, being brave enough to call our evil, and assert the unicity of truth in a culture that prefers gentle platitudes or a plurality of “truths” from which modern man is able to choose, or reject, by his taste. This “dictatorship of relativism” is harmful to the nature of man, and his spiritual life, and must be rejected. What sort of books could we read? The Fathers would be delighted to tell you! Not to neglect the classics, which contain so much truth, is a good starting point: Homer has not aged! And we don’t neglect our all-time favourites: Saints Augustine, Thomas and John Henry Newman, and the luminous intellect of Pope Benedict XVI. Here, our studies are beginning to become more explicitly philosophical and theological. Josef Pieper’s analysis of the virtues (The Four Cardinal Virtues) or the importance of leisure (Leisure: the basis of culture) are excellent starting points in which we could begin to cultivate a more Catholic intellectual life. The skills that this life demands are marvellous narrated, after St Thomas, by Fr Sertillanges O.P. in The Intellectual Life, whose counsel on how to choose what to read, and how to read it well, is luminous. One can never neglect the sober counsel of G.K. Chesterton, especially in Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man; the discovery of the aesthetical priority in man, which aids how he can be ordered more and more to the good abounds in the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, and it is marvellous accessible to all. With some attentiveness, subscribing to journals like First Things assist in our formation by contemporary thinkers; The Thomistic Institute podcast is an excellent mode of learning for those who prefer to listen as an inspiration to reading. Even a page a day, which brings fruitful meditation, can illuminate the mind, restoring it to the Lord, Who made it for Himself.
- Our relationships need maintenance too
Without becoming to inwardly focused, which is not an automatic consequence of preferring the interior and intellectual life, we want to think more widely about our role in maintaining the world, too. In some way, our personal formation is an indispensable precondition for bringing about some change in the world; we can only give what we have received, as they say. And so nourished in heart and mind, we could ask what we could do to bring about some essential maintenance in our relationships also. Beginning with our families and friends, and then extending this to our colleagues or clients, all on the foundation of our restored relationship with God, we could do something about bringing God’s light to our dealings with others. Tending to those most intimate to us, we may even find the strength to honour Our Lord’s command to tend to those intimate to His Sacred Heart: the poor, the marginalised and those who need to hear the Gospel. In this way, the Lord could use us to speak lovingly to the Zebulun and Naphtali in others’ lives also. There, it is He, the Light of the World, Who visits the places of neglect and brings restoration and peace. We don’t neglect, of course, to pray for peace in our world, which is constantly ravaged by the selfishness and greed of others. God, Who will not leave us as orphans, even to the consummation of the age, will not neglect the world, which He has made.
Let us ask the Lord, Who is our light and our salvation, to come to our aid, and begin within us a programme of spiritual maintenance; He is both the source of this desire and of the graces that will bring it about; let us ask Him to make our hearts receptive to His goodness. Amen.