Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an

encounter with Christ and his church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's word where it is most needed.

Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Please be with you. Friends for this 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to do something I don't do that often and that's to talk about the second reading.

It's from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians and it's so magnificent and it's so spiritually rich that I just can't overlook it.

It's toward the end of the letter and Paul in this kind of oblique strange way he

speaks of himself but in the third person about being lifted up, whether he's in his body or not, he doesn't know, whatever that means.

Lift it up to the third heaven. In other words, he's been given some extraordinary mystical

experience, some mystical elevation, and you find similar things. You know, in Thomas

Aquinas, in Theresa Vavala, John of the Cross and many of the other

mystics. So not altogether surprising that someone like St Paul would have

had this sort of extraordinary union with God.

But that's not the focus of the reading.

The focus now is on something else.

Paul says that I might not become too elated because of these extraordinary revelations.

What?

A thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan to beat me to keep me from becoming too

elated. So he's at the height, he's up to the third heaven in this mystical union with God, but as a balance, as a kind of

of spiritual counterweight, he's given this thorn in the flesh. Now what was it?

Clearly not some passing problem,

like a difficulty of the day.

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