One of the messages we’re hearing from scripture this month as Ordinary Time wears down is that God is the creator and sustainer of everything.

In the endtimes, seven is the number of the day. Seven equals perfection, and when the Lord of Lords comes again (Lord of Lords=777 in numerology), the perfect new creation will arrive with him. We’re closing in on the end of another church year, and the closer we get, the more talk of final things we’ll hear.

SOME SADDUCEES came up. This is the Jewish party that denies any possibility of resurrection. They asked, “Teacher, Moses wrote us that if a man dies and leaves a wife but no child, his brother is obligated to take the widow to wife and get her with child.

THE WIDOW of one of my best friends calls regularly to tell me how much she misses him, and inevitably she will break down in tears. After more than two years nothing is more important to her than the assurance that she and her husband will one day be together in heaven. She asks if I believe they will be, and I assure her it is so. The tender prayers at the funeral Mass remind us again and again, “We shall be reunited.”

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

"On what are you grounded?” could be scripture’s question this week. Is your work, 2 Thessalonians asks, grounded in the Lord, who brings it to fulfillment?

It’s November and there’s no denying winter now, even if we wanted to try. The birds have flown south, the leaves have changed color and fallen, the flowers have faded and turned to seed, the last of the harvest is in. The liturgical readings mirror nature.

False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead. —Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love