“I would like to ask the Lord to give us all the grace to guard our words, to watch what we say about others. It is a small penance, but it bears a lot of fruit. Sometimes, we think:‘I would like to taste that fruit and take the chance of criticizing another person.’ But if we don’t give into that hunger, it bears fruit and in the long run it’s good for us. That’s why we must ask the Lord for this grace, where we can adapt our lives to this new law, which is the law of patience, the law of love, the law of peace. We can at least try and hold our tongues a little, hold the comments we make of others. The outbursts that lead us to anger or insults. May the Lord grant us all this grace.”

Annunciation
A couple of thousand years ago, a young Jewish woman was going about her normal morning routines, perhaps with a mixture of house and garden work, chatting with parents and neighbours, aware of the local drought, the sickness of a neighbour and annoyed by the neighbourhood’s lack of sleep caused by the Romans’ noisy party the night before, when God broke into her routine and entered her life in a new and powerful way.
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