On this Ember Saturday, the readings speak for themselves. How interesting that they were deleted apparently by accident from the church’s yearly calendar after Vatican II!  These insistent implorings of God no longer funnel up from every temple to the Altar on High. How terribly tragic that is. In our modern culture, many people have an idea of God as unnecessary, that somehow they don’t really need his help. It might be nice if He would come to save them, perhaps on a second Tuesday in March, but in fact they don’t needHis help in the here and now.

Whereas the Church in her liturgy is always imploring God to come and intervene right now, because we are dying. Save us because we are perishing! In the mystery of Salvation history, we have the prophets to guide us, constantly begging and imploring God to act in our time. They implore us to prepare ourselves for God’s message, that prophetic tongue, by repentance. Those things go hand in hand. In the Liturgy, we ask God to stir Himself up, but are we prepared to stir ourselves up?

The undeniable truth is that sin is all around us; and the image of the three young men in the fire from the prophecy of Daniel is one perhaps we could take time to ponder at length. The fire is raging, representing the world and all that is evil attempting to destroy the Church. And yet God, miraculously, can make the internal workings of that fire like a dew laid in the grassy plain.  None of the evil can touch those inside the furnace, even though they were put there by wicked men.  A mistake has removed powerful and prophetic readings from our liturgical calendar, prophetic readings for such a time as this.

What committee could knit together hope, joy, repentance and longing in such a beautiful tapestry? These readings have no manmade scheme. No clever professor has put them together. They have grown together, organically, bedded into the Liturgy for which God gave us the Scriptures. May these readings help us to stir ourselves and to give us the ‘dew’ of His presence in the fiery furnace of the world and may they rise up from these temples anew to the Altar on High!