Eventide & Altar

Jesus tells a crowd following him that none of them has actually counted what it will cost. A builder who starts a tower without enough money to finish it becomes a joke to everyone watching the half-built thing stand there. Today the Church remembers Charles Borromeo, a bishop who spent his life making sure the Church's own ministers were properly formed before being sent out, insisting that willingness alone was never enough.

By this point in your life you have counted costs that younger people have not yet had to face - the cost of staying faithful through a marriage that grew hard, the cost of raising children who did not turn out the way you hoped, the cost of caring for a parent or a spouse long after it stopped being easy. Nobody warned you in advance how much any of that would actually take. You found out by paying it.

Paul's instruction tonight is not meant to frighten anyone: work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for God is the one who is at work in you both to desire and to accomplish it. The fear and trembling are honest about the stakes. The comfort is that you were never doing the working alone, not then and not now. Borromeo's own insistence on real formation, not just willingness, holds for a long life too - what carried you through the hardest years was rarely willpower alone.

The Glorious Mysteries tonight, since it is Wednesday. Offer the fourth mystery, the Assumption, for everyone in your book of names who paid a real cost for their faith and is now home.

• For the grace to count the true cost of faith honestly, without resentment, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who form others in the faith, through Charles Borromeo's example, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who have died, especially those whose costly faithfulness we only understood after they were gone, we pray to the Lord.

Name one cost your own faith has actually required of you across your life. Thank God for the strength that carried you through it, rather than only naming the cost.