Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.  First reading today is taken from the third chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Colossians. In the second chapter, the Apostle spoke of avoiding false philosophies, so false beliefs that come from the world. Here he speaks of avoiding sinful or bad behavior. So our being welcomed into the family of God means that we are now part of a family where our beliefs and our behaviors have to line up with the Lord's will.
Essentially, the embracing of our Catholic faith means that God has reoriented us. It's the fall season, the time when school starts up, so it's appropriate to speak about reorientation or orientation. The word orient means east, in Latin it's orientem, which means the rising sun or the part of the sky where the sun rises. So to be reoriented means to be turned back to the east, to be turned back to where the sun rises. Essentially, it's symbolic for being turned towards the risen Christ.
My life is oriented in the right direction when my back is no longer turned to God. Now I'm facing Him, I'm walking towards Him, I'm walking in the light of Christ. So reorientation and repentance, they often go hand in hand. Repent and believe in the gospel were Jesus' first words when He began to preach. Mark 1:15, repentance means turning away from sin and from a life of sin and changing the path that you're walking on in life. I was walking away from God, now I'm walking towards Him. That's repentance, that's reorientation.
And when you reorient yourself to God, interesting things happen. For one, you actually begin to believe that God exists, if you didn't believe that before, and you begin to believe that He's actually present and working in your life, but you also start to see and experience His presence and His hand in various ways. The Lord says in Isaiah 42:16, He says, "I will lead the blind in a way that they know not in paths that they have not known, I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground." The Lord opens the eyes of our mind and our heart so that we can see Him. And He actually begins to guide us.
The psalmist says in Psalm 23:3, "The Lord guides me along the right path for His name's sake." And with this reorientation, you also discover something really amazing. You actually discover that God is good, that He is patient, that He's merciful, that He's kind and understanding, that He's generous. You discover in short that God is love, that He is a loving Father. In Exodus 34:6, God says that He is, "compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness." The psalmist says in Psalm 145:8-9, "The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in mercy. The Lord is good to all and has compassion over all He has made."  And St. John adds in 1 John 3:1, "See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God. And so we are." And so people discover the goodness and the love of God.  And you know what happens to a lot of them? A lot of them become smaller. They go into a reverse aging process. They spiritually become like little children who finally discovered their true loving parents.
That's exactly what our Lord speaks about in Matthew 18:3, when He says, "Unless you turn, so unless you reorient yourselves and become like little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." And Luke 18:17, He says, "Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." The Lord says elsewhere, "He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water." John 7:38, essentially turning towards Christ and embracing Him, you find the fountain of youth. You actually find the fountain of eternal youth.
"The water I shall give him," says the Lord, "will become in him a spring of water, welling up to eternal life." John 4:14, He said to the woman at the well, God's grace, His living water makes those who reorient themselves to Him, makes them humble, docile, teachable, merciful. It restores their purity and their innocence. And then the Lord rolls up His sleeves and begins really transforming us. That's usually the painful part. He begins molding us and refashioning us so that we look and begin to start and look and act and think and choose more like Jesus and Mary would do. We begin to become their copies essentially on earth.
Isaiah 64:8 says, "Yes, oh Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay and you are the potter. We are all the work of your hand." Well, this usually takes time and patience and perseverance on our part to be transformed and molded. We have to persevere in our reorientation program as we learn to grow in the virtues of holiness, as we learn to grow in the virtues, essentially of charity, humility, mercy, gratitude, obedience.
Lastly, for today, St. Paul offers some practical spiritual advice in today's first reading to encourage us in persevering in our reorientation. He says in Colossians 3:1-3, "Seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things of the earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." When he says set your minds on the things above, the apostle is saying that our thought habits and our heart habits need to change, need to make a conscious effort to think of the Lord and of Our Lady, and we do that especially in prayer, obviously, and also through meditation, and even simply thinking about spiritual truths and realities during the day, hopefully without it getting too much in the way of our duties and our state of life.
If you're doing an operation, you probably don't want to be thinking too much about how many angels are in heaven if you're on the operating table and you're doing the operation as a doctor, right? When we learn to, however, reorient our minds and our thoughts and our hearts towards the Lord, and when we take every thought captive in obedience to Christ, as St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:5, we truly become a new person. We truly become a better person. We become more and more the person that the Lord created us to be.
"Behold, I make all things new," Jesus says in Revelation 21:5, and that includes His children. He makes all of us new when He reorients us towards Himself. So let's ask our Lord and Our Lady for help then in being able to raise our thoughts and our concerns and our worries and our anxieties above the things of the world, and to be able to have our thoughts and our hearts set on where our life has been reoriented to, essentially to God, to heaven, and to the truths that set us free, as Jesus says in John 8:32.  Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.