In today's readings and with the celebration of today's feast of the North American Martyrs, we are called to see the divine law and the precepts of the Church as freeing us and guiding us to Our Lord, to our heavenly home. The Pharisees of Jesus' day couldn't see this as they were too legalistic, but the martyrs who we commemorate today show how to live by the spirit of the law, that is to have a relationship with God, to die to self, to be freed from bondage to a purely strict observance of letter of the law and to be set on the way to freedom, to Heaven by both the spirit and the letter of the law of God.