Hi, I'm Matthew Kelly, and welcome to Feed Your Soul. In this Sunday's gospel, we hear about readiness, about preparation. As human beings, we prepare for everything we consider important. Things we don't prepare for, consciously or subconsciously, we're essentially saying, "That's not important to me." And so one of the things that we learn this Sunday is to pay attention to what do you really prepare yourself for. Where do you spend your time, effort, and energy readying yourself for things? Let's take a look at this Sunday's gospel. The kingdom of heaven shall be compared to 10 maidens who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. 5 of them were foolish, and 5 were wise. For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But at midnight, there was a cry, "Behold, the bridegroom. Come out to meet him." Then all those maidens rose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, "Give us some of your oil for our lamps are going out." But the wise replied, "Perhaps there will not be enough for us and for you. Go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves." And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came. And those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast. And the door was shut. Afterward, the other maidens came also saying, "Lord, Lord, open to us." But He replied, "Truly, I say to you, 'I do not know you.' Watch therefore for you know neither the day nor the hour."

What is the thing or the things that you have most prepared for in your life? What are the things that you've spent most time, effort, energy preparing for in your life? And why did you spend so much time, effort, and energy preparing for those things? For whatever reason, good or bad, you believe those things to be important. Very often, we consider them important for reasons of getting ahead in the world, reasons of accomplishing something, maybe just reasons of ego and appearance. And in today's gospel, Jesus is challenging us to prepare ourselves, to be ready for the most important things. And of course, when we read this gospel reading, our mind quickly goes to the moment, right, the moment when we die. And will we be ready? And I think that certainly, the gospel reading is about that. It does allude to that. But in preparing for that moment, there are thousands of micro preparations. The one I want you to think about this week is preparing for mass on Sunday. How do you prepare yourself to go and experience the genius of the mass on Sunday?

One of the reasons we send these videos out to you earlier in the week is because we want you to reflect on the gospel reading in advance of getting to mass. In Rediscover Catholicism, I talked about how on Wednesday evening, I reflect on the gospel for the following Sunday. Why? Because we love what we know. We love what we're familiar with. When you get in the car and you hear a song on the radio and you know the song, you react. You respond differently to that song than if you get in the car and you hear a song that you've never heard before. And so familiarity with what we're going to hear at the Sunday Gospels, by sowing that seed during the week, what happens? Well, that seed begins to grow in our hearts. And when we come to church on Sunday, we hear the gospel again. And we've already read it. We've already thought about it. It's already been growing in our heart a little bit. We hear it in a different way, and we're able to go to a new level. And so that's just one way we can prepare for a Sunday mass.

Another way is obviously not only being there on time, but being there a little bit earlier so that you're not in a rush so that you can steal your heart, you can steal your mind, you can steal your soul and to be present, ready, prepared when mass begins. You see people rushing in, and I have been that person sometimes. I will confess. Rushing in at the last moment or even a couple of moments late. And they're in this state. They're in this state of unreadiness. They're in this state of they're not prepared for this. And it takes them how long? I don't know. Five minutes, seven minutes to settle down. Or maybe their mind's still preoccupied with whatever it is that made them late. And so they're not actually able to settle their souls and their hearts and their minds to experience Jesus in the Eucharist, to experience the mass in all of its genius. And so when we hear these readings about these enormous topics, the challenge is to draw the truth and the wisdom of the enormous topic back into micro iterations that we can live every day or, in this case, every week. And one way to prepare ourselves for our final meeting with God is to prepare ourselves for our meeting with God each Sunday at mass.