My 5-year-old nephew is already playing Mass, as Catholic children are wont to do. He holds up his cup with both hands at the supper table and delivers a string of words culled from the liturgy but arranged most creatively.

Who wants to suffer? If anyone raises a hand, back away and call an attending physician. Suffering is not a desirable condition, and those who possess mental health not only don’t seek it, but actively avoid it.

Don’t discriminate in your hearts, the great New Testament essayist James warns us. Yet by the time we hear these words most of us have been doing just that for a lifetime. We learn early to prefer the clean boy to the untidy one; the fellow citizen to the foreigner; the well-dressed woman to the one wearing a jacket that’s behind the fashion.

Here’s a dichotomy of readings that invites us to think: Moses presents to the people a law that ostensibly contains the mind of God. Not a thing must be added or subtracted from it. Jesus disparages the legal experts for clinging to the law, down to the last details.

Most of us start making conscious decisions around the age of 2, the year we learn to say “no.” If we can say no, one presumes we’re giving tacit assent to those events we don’t resist.

A lot of voices compete for our attention these days. Voices of doom tell us that all is lost—the economy has driven off a cliff and taken our future with it. And there are voices of blame saying we must point a finger at one sort of politics or another for the present state of society.

A common error in the early phase of the spiritual life is to imagine that religion is predominantly a spiritual matter. Spirituality is therefore approached as a sort of neatening-up-of-the-soul, getting our metaphysical affairs in order.

The brain is a disorderly vehicle for thinking: untidy and easily distracted. It also has the unnerving tendency to act like a sieve whenever we’re trying to remember something important, meanwhile fastening stubbornly on the disturbing incident we’d most like to forget.

Last week we emphasized the reality of spiritual hunger and the necessity to engage the spiritual works of mercy. This weekend’s gospel provides ballast for that idea by reminding us that physical hunger is just as real and has a vital claim on our compassion.

Back in grade school I smelled a rat when it came to the works of mercy. I understood perfectly why feeding the hungry or giving water to the thirsty was a compassionate thing to do. And of course the homeless need shelter, the shivering need clothing, the sick and imprisoned want company, and the dead could use a proper burial.