The Memorial of Saint Peter Claver
Now concerning virgins, I have no commandment from the Lord, but I give my judgment as one who has obtained mercy from the Lord to be trustworthy. Therefore I think that because of the distress that is on us, it's good for a man to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Don't seek to be freed. Are you free from a wife? Don't seek a wife. But if you marry, you have not sinned. If a virgin marries, she has not sinned. Yet such will have oppression in the flesh, and I want to spare you. But I say this, brothers: the time is short. From now on, both those who have wives may be as though they had none; And those who weep, as though they didn't weep; and those who rejoice, as though they didn't rejoice; and those who buy, as though they didn't possess; And those who use the world, as not using it to the fullest. For the mode of this world passes away.
So the king will desire your beauty, Honor him, for he is your lord. The daughter of Tyre comes with a gift. The rich among the people entreat your favor.
She shall be led to the king in embroidered work. The virgins, her companions who follow her, shall be brought to you. With gladness and rejoicing they shall be led. They shall enter into the king's palace.
Your sons will take the place of your fathers. You shall make them princes in all the earth. I will make your name to be remembered in all generations. Therefore the peoples shall give you thanks forever and ever.
He lifted up his eyes to his disciples, and said: "Blessed are you who are poor, For God's Kingdom is yours. Blessed are you who hunger now, For you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, For you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude and mock you, and throw out your name as evil, for the Son of Man's sake. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven, for their fathers did the same thing to the prophets. "But woe to you who are rich! For you have received your consolation. Woe to you, you who are full now, For you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, For you will mourn and weep. Woe, when men speak well of you, For their fathers did the same thing to the prophets.
Peter Claver was a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit who spent decades in Cartagena, Colombia, meeting slave ships as they arrived — going below deck into conditions most people couldn't bear, to offer food, medicine, and dignity to enslaved Africans before they ever set foot on land. He called himself "the slave of the slaves forever." That phrase alone could carry us through the whole day.
Notice how everything in these readings pulls against the current of ordinary ambition. Paul isn't being dismissive of marriage or commerce or grief — he's pointing at something more urgent. The world as we know it is passing away, he says, and so our grip on any of it should loosen. Not because these things don't matter, but because clinging too tightly distorts them. Consider how differently we move through a day when we hold our plans loosely — when a canceled meeting or a difficult conversation doesn't unravel us, because we're not secretly banking everything on outcomes.
Then Luke's Beatitudes arrive and flip the ledger entirely. The poor, the hungry, the weeping — these are the ones God is already turning toward. Not because suffering is good, but because suffering tends to empty us of the illusion that we're self-sufficient. Peter Claver understood this intuitively. He didn't go to those ships to feel noble. He went because he saw Christ there, in the hold, in the dark.
The practical thread running through all of this is detachment — not coldness, but freedom. The freedom to be fully present to whoever is in front of us right now, without calculating what it costs us.
As we move through this day, a few questions worth sitting with: Where are we gripping something so tightly that it's keeping us from seeing clearly? Who is the person in front of us today that we might be tempted to look past? And what would it mean, even in one small moment, to hold our comfort a little more loosely?