On Saturdays, we pre-send the Sunday reflection for families - the same one Hearth & Altar subscribers receive at the table together.

Have a blessed Sunday - we'll be back Monday morning.

Sunday's Reflection — Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Is 56:1, 6-7; Ps 67:2-3, 5-6, 8; Rom 11:13-15, 29-32; Mt 15:21-28

My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Isaiah said this centuries before the Canaanite woman showed up in the Gospel - before she followed Jesus through the street shouting, before she knelt in front of him, before she argued her way through the word that seemed to exclude her. But when she arrived, the house was already supposed to be for her.

She came for her daughter. Everything she did - the shouting, the kneeling, the refusing to leave, the argument from the scraps - she did it for someone she loved who could not come for herself. Jesus didn't answer. The disciples tried to send her away. He told her plainly: I was not sent to people like you.

She said: please, Lord. Even the dogs eat the scraps from the table.

And Jesus said: O woman, great is your faith. Her daughter was healed from that hour.

Paul says today: God delivered all to disobedience that he might have mercy upon all. The plan was always mercy for everyone. The Canaanite woman was not an exception to it. She was its demonstration.

Yesterday Our Lady's Thirty Days began. Today: introduce the Hail Holy Queen as your family's Sunday prayer for this season. It closes the Rosary and has been prayed by people of every nation for nearly a thousand years.

Universal Prayer

• For our family, that our home would be a house of prayer for all peoples - open to the Canaanite woman, open to anyone who comes seeking the mercy that is always larger than the boundary, we pray to the Lord.
• For the children in our family, that they would grow up knowing God's plan ends in mercy for everyone - including the people outside every boundary their world assumes, we pray to the Lord.
• Under the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in the first week of Our Lady's Thirty Days, for the practice of praying the Hail Holy Queen together on Sundays, we pray to the Lord.
• For those in our family who feel like they are on the outside of what God would do for them - that today's Gospel would reach them: the house is for you, we pray to the Lord.

Faith in Action

Tonight after dinner: pray the Hail Holy Queen together. If you don't know it by heart, read it.

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us; and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

If your children are younger: let them hold a flower from yesterday's feast while you pray it. Tell them: this prayer has been said by people all over the world for almost a thousand years.

A Note for Parents

The Canaanite woman came for her daughter, not for herself. She was willing to argue, to be ignored, to be told no, to kneel - for her daughter. That is what parental intercession looks like. Your prayers for your children are in that line.