# ‘Find Jesus, and you will find peace’

**By:** Magnificat  
**Published:** 2026-08-30T06:00:00.000Z  
**Source:** [The Catholic Herald](https://thecatholicherald.com/article/find-jesus-and-you-will-find-peace)

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Magnificat

Magnificat

Monday is the last day of August, and on Tuesday we go into September: the intense heat of the summer is over and we are going into the time when we celebrate what harvest remains after the drought. From September 1 until October 4, the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi (this year we mark the eighth centenary of his death), the Church leads us into the Season of Creation. The cover of Magnificat’s September issue is taken from an illumination painted around 1480, which brings all the imagery of creation to the foreground, as the accompanying essay (page 8) by Pierre-Marie Dumont explains.
On Tuesday it is the memorial of Saint Aidan and the Saints of Lindisfarne, a reminder of the importance of early monasticism in the evangelisation of our country (the memorial of Saint Cuthbert occurs on Friday). The Gospel for Tuesday (Luke 4:16-30, from the 22nd Tuesday in Ordinary Time) reminds us, however, that even Our Lord was not always appreciated in the locality where he was best known.
And he said, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his home town. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up, and drove him out of the town, and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away. (Luke 4:24-30)
In keeping with this incident, the Saint Who? series features “saints of the ordinary”. “Over the years, the Holy Family’s neighbours in Nazareth must have watched Joseph – and later Jesus – repair their tools, work on their homes, and build furniture for them. But they apparently thought Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were just an ordinary family. After all, when Jesus briefly returned to Nazareth with his disciples, the people called him a carpenter and the son of Joseph, but not the Son of God. The saints described in this month’s essays also seemed common and unremarkable to their neighbours.”
The series features people you may never have heard of until now. In this first week we have Saint Lydia of Thyatira, who was a supporter of Saint Paul, as well as Saint Guy of Anderlecht, Saint Zita of Lucca and Blessed Henry of Bolzano – all of whom were lay people who put themselves at the service of the Church and their local communities. In the Gospel for Wednesday (Luke 4:38-44), we are reminded of another such person, Saint Peter’s mother-in-law, who no sooner had she been healed by Jesus, stood up and waited on him and his followers.
Thursday is the feast of Saint Gregory the Great, “Apostle to the English”, who sent missionaries to our lands back in the 6th century, and was known for dining with 12 paupers every evening. He was also the first pope to sign himself “the Servant of the Servants of God”. On page 50 we have a telling meditation from this great pontiff.
“When we compare our earthly possessions with the happiness of heaven, they seem a burden and not a help. When we compare our life in time with eternal life, we have to call it death rather than life. What is our daily decline into decomposition and decay but a kind of extension of death? Who can describe the joys of heaven? Whose mind can grasp them? There we will take part with the choirs of angels, we will share with the blessed spirits in our Creator’s glory, we will see the face of God before us and behold infinite light, we will feel no fear of death but rejoice in the gift of everlasting life! Even to hear these things sets us on fire! We are filled with longing to be where we hope to rejoice without end.”
On Saturday we celebrate the optional memorial of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, another notable servant of the most poor and destitute. After the Gospel (Luke 6:1-5) about Our Lord’s disciples being castigated by some Pharisees for plucking and eating heads of grain on the Sabbath, we have a short meditation from Mother Teresa (page 74):
“If you really want to grow in love, come back to the Eucharist, come back to that adoration… Look at the tabernacle… Is my heart so clean that I can see Jesus there? To make it easy for you and for me to see Jesus, he made himself the bread of life, so that we can receive life, so that we may have a life of peace, a life of joy. Find Jesus, and you will find peace. Every moment of prayer, especially before our Lord in the tabernacle, is a sure positive gain. The time we spend in having our daily audience with God is the most precious part of the whole day.”
Finally, the Gospel for Sunday reminds us of the solemn trust invested in the Apostles and the power of prayer which they must exemplify.
“Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” (Matthew 18:18-20)
A meditation by Bernard Bro OP (page 85) elaborates on this:
“Just as I do not invent my life, I do not invent my faith but instead receive it as it is. Likewise, I do not have to invent my prayer, but I receive Christ’s prayer, born of the Spirit of God and already existing in the community of his children. The older people introduce the little ones to the life of Christ; the previous generations educate and admit the new generations into this movement of prayer born of Christ and supported by the fact that he is waiting for us…”
Or as the hymn for that evening puts it:
Father in heaven, who lovest all,
O help thy children when they call,
That they may build from age to age
An undefilèd heritage.
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