This Sunday, we learn that Jesus came to found a universal Church and to unite Himself with the individual soul.
The Gospel is a “leaven” of Divinity hiding in the “three measures” of our intellect, will and body until our “whole” humanity is leavened. Like the tiny mustard seed becoming a large tree of shelter for the birds of the air, the Church, from humble beginnings in the Catacombs, has stretched out to undiscovered ends of foreign missions, her divine culture transforming or overcoming all human culture throughout nineteen centuries.
The Epistle first describes the interior life of faith, hope and charity in the souls of the first lay converts to Christ, and then proceeds to describe their Christian Action in propagating the Faith, so that they “were a pattern” to all, and their neighbours ‘in Macedonia and Achaia” like “birds of the air” came and “dwelt in the branches” of the Church.
The 15th November is the Feast of St. Albert the Great, German Franciscan, of the XIII Century, who taught philosophy and theology at the University of Paris and Cologne where St. Thomas Aquinas was one of his students. Later, he became Bishop of Regensburg. Although not commemorated in the Mass using the 1962 Missal, we can perhaps pray to the Saint for clear thinking and to strengthen both the Church and ourselves.