Easter, Ascension & Pentecost – Page 2

Novena to Holy Spirit

Come, Creator Spirit,

visit the minds of your children,

and fill the hearts you have made,

with heavenly grace.

You are called the Comforter,

the gift of God most high,

living spring, and fire, love,

and spiritual anointing.

You are sevenfold in your gifts,

the finger of God’s right hand;

you are the Father’s true promise,

endowing our tongues with speech.

Enkindle your light in our senses,

infuse your life in our hearts;

strengthen our bodies’ weakness

by your never failing might.

Drive far away our foe,

and grant peace without end,

that with you to lead us on,

we may escape all harm.

Grant us, through you,

to know the Father, also the Son;

may we ever believe in you,

the Spirit of them both.

Amen.

In preparation for the great Solemnity of Pentecost, my hope is we are praying the novena to the Holy Spirit. We need to beg the Holy Spirit for His grace! It can be done anytime of the day, perhaps a good time is in the evening. Here is the translation of the ancient Latin hymn.

(the translation was done by one of the monks of Spencer Abbey).

The Ascension of the Lord

On … “reflection on the meaning of the Ascension is found in this phrase: Jesus took his place. After having undergone the humiliation of his passion and death, Jesus took his place at the right-hand of God; he took his place with his eternal Father. But he also entered heaven as our Head. Whereupon, in the expression of Leo the Great, the glory of the Head became the hope of the body. For all eternity Christ takes is place as the firstborn among many brethren: our nature is with God in Christ. And as man, the Lord Jesus lives for ever to intercede for us with Father. At the same time, from his throne of glory, Jesus sends out to the whole Church a message of hope and a call to holiness.

“Because of Christ’s merits, because of his intercession with the Father, we are able to attain justice and holiness of life, in him. The Church may indeed experience difficulties, the Gospel may suffer setbacks, but because Jesus is at the right-hand of the Father the Church will never know defeat. Christ’s victory is ours. The power of the glorified Christ, the beloved Son of the eternal Father, is superabundant, to sustain each of us and all of us in the fidelity of our dedication to God’s Kingdom and in the generosity of our celibacy. The efficacy of Christ’s Ascension touches all us in the concrete reality of our daily lives. Because of this mystery it is the vocation of the whole Church to wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

“Dear sons, be imbued with the hope that is so much a part of the mystery of the Ascension of Jesus. Be deeply conscious of Christ’s victory and triumph over sin and death. Realize that the strength of Chist is greater than our weakness, greater than the weakness of the whole world. Try to understand and share the joy that Mary experienced in knowing that her Son had taken his place with his Father, whom he loved infinitely. And renew your faith today in the promise of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has gone to prepare a place for us, so that he can come back again and take us to himself.

St John Paul, Ascension Thursday, 1979

Sing Alleluia, Christian

After all our trials have ceased, our life will be taken up entirely with God’s praises. Therefore, it is our custom to commemorate this peaceful and blissful state by chanting Alleluia more frequently and joyfully during these fifty days.

In the book of Revelation, John the Evangelist says that he heard the throngs of heavenly powers singing this word. And the venerable father, Tobit, perceiving something of the glory of the citizens on high and the splendor of the heavenly Jerusalem, described it with these mystical words:

All the streets shall be paved with white and clean stones,and, Alleluia shall be sung in its streets. (Tobit 13:22)

St. Bede the Venerable
Quoted in: Your Hearts Will Rejoice
Ludolph of Saxony, Carthusian

Bear the mark of Jesus

In the Gospel it is revealed that Jesus breaks bread on the road to Emmaus. This 12th century monastic author teaches:

“Break yourself, then, by the labor of obedience, by the humiliation of repentance. Bear in your body the marks of Jesus Christ by accepting the condition of a servant, not of a superior. And when you have emptied yourself, you will know the Lord through the breaking of bread.”

The 8th Day of the Resurrection

Today is Thomas Sunday. Also known by other names, Low Sunday and now Divine Mercy Sunday. The Church asks to make connections between what we commemorate in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Today is a fitting day to account for our faith in what the Lord said and did was true.

St. Thomas gives witness: what do we believe and what do we do? St. Thomas also opens for us the new mission given my the Lord Himself began when the Father missioned Him. Consider a few things taught in the Catechism we read:

“Jesus is often addressed as “Lord” in the gospels as a sign of respect and trust. In the encounter with the risen Jesus, this title becomes adoration: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20.28) and “It is the Lord!” (Jn 21.7). (CCC 448)

“When his visible presence was taken from them, Christ did not leave his disciples orphans but remained with them to the end of time by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. As a result, our communion with Jesus has become in a way more intense.” (CCC 788).

AND

“Jesus is the Father’s Emissary, the one the Father has sent. Jesus, in turn, chooses and sends out the Twelve to preach in his name (Mk 3.13-14). These are his emissaries (Greek apostoloi), in whom Christ continues his own mission: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (Jn 20.21) and “He who receives you receives me” (Mt 1.40; Lk 10.16). (CCC 858).

The full appreciation of the Paschal Mystery maintains a connection with the Feast of the Nativity. Archbishop DiNoia recently preached the following:

The Resurrection of Christ is in a real sense the fulfillment of the Annunciation when Mary’s fiat opened the way to our redemption, and her own. The body of our risen Lord—the same body he offered in sacrifice on the cross—was the body he received from Mary in the womb. What is more, Easter has made her what we hope to be as well. “Welcoming the risen Jesus, Mary is … a sign and anticipation of humanity which hopes to achieve its fulfilment through the resurrection of the dead” (Pope St. John Paul II, General Audience, 21 May 1997). Our Lady is the first one to share in the resurrection of her Son, the first fruits, as it were, of Easter: assumed into heaven and now reigning as Queen of Heaven, she anticipates the resurrection of our bodies and the life of bliss to come. How easy it is to imagine with Sedulius that she who was “the way by which he once came to us, might also signal his return.”

At Easter, we call on Mary to rejoice—Regina coeli, laetare—thus “prolonging in time the ‘rejoice’ that the Angel addressed to her at the Annunciation” (Pope St. John Paul II, General Audience, 21 May 1997). While the (probably Franciscan) author of this wonderful antiphon is unknown, there is a beautiful legend that Pope St. Gregory the Great—as he followed barefoot in procession with St. Luke’s icon of Mary—heard angels singing the first lines, and added what would become the antiphon’s concluding line: “Ora pro nobis Deum, Alleluia.”

Archbishop J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P.
April 16, 2017
DHS

Blessed Easter

Dear friends in Christ: today, right now, we realize that our lives are filled with Divine meaning. Our personal stories are a part of a much bigger narrative. Your life, my life — our lives are all a part of the story of the family of God and the history of salvation. Jesus Christ is the point of unity and completeness in God.

In the First Ode of the Canon of Pascha, we read (sing):

It is the day of Resurrection! O people, let us be enlightened by it.
The Passover is the Lord’s Passover,
snce Chrits our God has brought us from death to life,
and from earth to heaven,
Therefore we sing the hymn of victory!
CHRIST IS RISEN FRM THE DEAD!
Let us cleanse our sense that we may see the risen Christ,
in the glory of the Resurrection and clearly hear Him greetinbg us:
Rejoice! as we sing the hymn of victory!
CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD!
Let the heaves properly rejoice and let the earth be glad;
and let the whole visible and invisble world celebrate,
for Christ, our everlastng joy, is rosen!
CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD!
It is the day of Resurrection! O people, let us be enlightened by it.
The Passover is the Lord’s Passover,
snce Chrits our God has brought us from death to life,
and from earth to heaven,
Therefore we sing the hymn of victory!

Happy Easter!

Pentecost

In fact, the paschal mystery — the passion, death and resurrection of Christ and his ascension into Heaven — finds its fulfillment in the powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles gathered together with Mary, Mother of the Lord, and the other disciples. It was the “baptism” of the Church, baptism in the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:5)… God’s voice divinized the human language of the Apostles who were enabled to proclaim the one divine Word in a “polyphonic” manner. The breath of the Holy Spirit fills the universe, generates faith, leads to truth, and predisposes people to unity…The Holy Spirit, “who is the Lord and Giver of life” — as we say in the Creed — is joined to the Father through the Son and completes the revelation of the Blessed Trinity. He comes from God like a breath from his mouth and has the power of sanctifying, abolishing divisions, dispelling the confusion due to sin. Incorporeal and immaterial, he lavishes divine goods upon living beings and sustains them so that they may act in conformity with the good. As an intelligible Light he gives meaning to prayer, vigor to the evangelizing mission, he makes the hearts of those who listen to the happy message burn and inspires Christian art and liturgical music.

Pentecost
Benedict XVI
Regina Caeli Address, June 12, 2011

Because the Holy Spirit charges the world

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

“God’s Grandeur”
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Between Ascension and Pentecost

In the period between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost Sunday the Church gives us a reminder that we are to follow the key example of communion there is, the communion (unity) between God the Father and God the Son. Saint Cyril of Alexandria tells us that the unity of Father and Son is known in the Last Supper.

Cyril said, “Who could separate those who are united to Christ through that one sacred body, or destroy their true union with one another? If we all share one loaf we all become one body, for Christ cannot be divided.”

I am grateful for this reminder in a time when there is so much division in our country, Church, and in our own hearts. The psalmist talks about the divided heart, the forked tongue; the spiritual masters speak against gossip (murmuring) and the seeds of division. Do we allow negativity and fear to rule our lives? Sadly, no seems to be free of the divisions caused by sin: not the laity, certainly not the clergy, not business people, not healthcare professionals and not the politicians and the like.

Only in Christ Jesus can we find our hope. Are we united to the Body of Christ –in sacrament, in Church, in family, with ourselves?

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

In the Gospel according to St. Mark we read:

Jesus said to his disciples: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.”

Pope St. Leo the Great:
“Since the Ascension of Christ is our elevation, and since, where the glory of the Head has preceded its, there hope for the body is also invited, let us exult, dearly beloved, with worthy joy and be glad with a holy thanksgiving. Today we are established not only as possessors of Paradise, but we have even penetrated the heights of the heavens in Christ, prepared more fully for it through the indescribable grace of Christ which we had lost through the ill will of the devil.”