Celtic Daily Light

Extracts from Ray Simpson's Book

Readings for Tuesday 8th October 2024

Strathy Bay

We can choose good or evil

If you carry out the commands I give you today you will receive a blessing. If you turn away from these commands, to go after false gods, you will receive a curse.

Deuteronomy 11: 27, 28

God created all human beings in God’s image, to be like God. God has made animals more powerful than human beings, but we have been given intelligence and freedom.

We alone are able to recognise God as our maker, and therefore to understand the goodness of God’s creation. We alone have the capacity to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong. This means that our actions need not be compulsions, we do not have to be swayed by our immediate wants and desires, as are the animals. Instead, we can make choices. Day by day, hour by hour, we have to make decisions. In each decision we can choose either good or evil. This freedom to choose make us like God. If we choose evil, that freedom becomes a curse. If we choose good, it becomes our greatest blessing.

Pelagius

There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him. The obstacle is in our ‘self’, that is to say in the tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistic will.

Thomas Merton

  • Toothache starts in a rotten tooth,
  • Then the pain spreads through the jaw
  • Until one’s whole head starts to throb.
  • Every thought is filled with toothache.
  • Sin starts with a rotten action,
  • Then the pleasure spreads through the body
  • Until the soul itself becomes enslaved.
  • Every feeling is filled with sinful desire.
  • Pull out the aching tooth.
  • Root out the sinful action

Robert Van de Weyer Celtic Parables

  • Each day, Lord, help me to throw out some of the bad
  • and to draw out some of the good.