In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence. I beg your pardon for my sins, and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my Father and Lord,

my guardian angel intercede for me.

It is in the nature of people in love to demand total exclusivity of one another when they love.

If their love is going to prove sincere and true.

In other words, love somehow requires a purity of heart, a single-mindedness in the person loving. This is, in essence, what our Lord

teaches us today in the gospel this Sunday. If we open up St. John's Gospel, we read about the cleansing of the temple.

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and he found in the temple men selling oxen, sheep and doves and money changers at their tables.

And making a kind of whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple.

Also the sheep and oxen and he poured out the money of the money changers and overturned the tables.

And to them who were selling doves, he said,

Take these things away, and do not make the house of my father a house of business.

And his disciples remembered that it is written,

zeal for thy house has consumed me.

Why did our Lord get upset?

This is a rare moment in the gospel when he is kind of angry. But our Lord who had all

his passions in order, he willed to be angry. And his anger was justified because the worship that was due to his father was being mingled with human motives,

with motives that were not worthy of his father God.

And when it comes to the sacred, our Lord makes no allowances for competition.

Lord, you had already said it.

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