AUGUST 8, 2026 FATHER HENK VAN MEIJEL
Pretty strong language Jesus is using.
If you have any kind of faith, you can say to this mountain: “Move from here to there.” And of course, his analogy is pretty strong.
After the high having the transfiguration, this incredible spiritual experience. And usually, after spiritual experiences, we are, if we have a spiritual experience, it kind of looks like depression. You feel a little down.
And I presume Jesus had the same thing. He comes from down the mountain and he has to go back to real life, and here we are, nothing has changed. The disciples do their best, so he brings up the faith.
If you had only the faith of a mustard seed, he’s basically saying, you’re still faithless, after all you’ve seen. And faith, I think, is about trusting in God. Can I trust in God? Can I trust that God will take care of me?
And this is also a theme, which in the first reading of Habakkuk, we have Habakkuk the prophet, who was really a contemporary of Jeremiah. He’s he’s looking at the world, and he says: “How can the faithless, how can they just go on, and they just feast and party and whatever, and they don’t care about anything. How is it that you just stand by and do nothing?”
And what God says, in time there will be justice. In time there will be justice. And the justice came with the Babylonian exile, when they were all deported to Babylon, and lost all the nice pleasures of life.
But faith, it’s something. It’s a gift of God. It’s a gift of God first, but we have to say yes to it. Yes, Lord, I want to be one of yours. May I be possessed by the Holy Spirit. And may I be used for the good of others.
Today we celebrate Saint Dominic. We have a memorial of Saint Dominic today, who lived 1170-1221. And he grew up in a time when the Church was really a big mess. The believers in the pew, they believed.
But it’s the higher echelon of the Church, the bishops and so on, those who were in leadership positions, they were just doing whatever. Just like in the time of Habakkuk, where the leaders of the people just were taking care of themselves, and did whatever.
It’s something in our human psyche that we always want to be comfortable. And we’re always trying to make things comfortable for us. Nothing has changed today. I see it in religious life too, where we can so easily become a little lax, and we want to take care of ourselves.
Saint Dominic is saying, if we have faith, we’d better prove it. And so, Saint Dominic, when he started with the Dominicans, they started to live in relative poverty. Not like many of the religious who were living kind of lavishly, and especially the leadership.
It was a little controversial at his time. But he was one of those people who changed things. Who brought renewal in the Church. He actually also popularized the Rosary. Some people say he came up with the Rosary, but it was there already, and he made it popular.
I think he used that very much so in the Albigensian heresy, which was in southern France and northern Italy at that time. Where people kind of had veered off to the faith. Not that they didn’t have any faith, but it went away from the teachings.
And it was kind of a Gnostic revival, where they were thinking of a two-god system. You have the good god, and the bad god, and can reincarnate after your death in the good god, and finally maybe you’re going to have reached salvation. Kind of a very strange teaching.
But these teachings, they creep into the Church over time, and of course, we live in a spiritual world, and of course, the devil is always at work. Always trying to move people. And especially the closer we come to God, the harder the evil one will try to move people away.
If Satan can move us one way or another, he will. But Saint Dominic and the early Dominicans, they were able to bring some healing to it. And, like I said, introduced the Rosary, as a way of bringing healing.
But faith, it’s good to look at it on our own level. How faithful am I? How open am I to God? Am I really trusting that God is in my life? Can I give everything to God? And whatever I have, house, bank account, whatever. Can I say God may be used for the good of others?
I’m not saying give all your money away at once. But can I take some distance of all my worldly possessions, and really put my trust in God? And especially this becomes very important in our last days. When God is going to call us home.
To be people of faith. God draws different people into the faith. And we have the examples especially of the mystics.
Where we can see that battle between good and evil. Padre Pio was always under attack, for example. Or Gemma Galgani, who died in 1903, also always under attack. Her faith always being tested by the devil.
But of course, God is much stronger, and God will persevere. It’s good stuff to pray with. Amen.
