| Whether you are an Eastern Christian or a Western Christian, it is said that we are at mid-lent. The intensity of prayer, fasting and almsgiving ramps up to discipline or body, mind and soul in preparation to receive the graces of Holy Week and then Easter. The following text from Saint Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor of the Church, will give us perspective thus helping us to reflect upon our spiritual journey thus far. Many of us will weaken in our lenten observance. But don’t that happen. There is much at stake. |
| St Ambrose’s preaching: Give thanks, Brethren, to the Divine Mercy which has brought you safely halfway through the season of Lent. For this favor they give praise to God, thankfully and with devotion, who in these days have striven to live in the manner which they were instructed at the beginning of Lent; that is, those who, coming with eagerness to the Church, have sought with sighs and tears, in daily fasting and almsdeeds, to obtain the forgiveness of their sins. They, however, who have neglected this duty, that is to say, those who have not fasted daily, or given alms, or those who were indifferent or unmoved in prayer, they have no reason to rejoice, but rather, unhappy that they are, for mourning. Yet let them not mourn as if they had no hope; for He Who could give back sight to the blind from birth (cf. Jn 9), can likewise change those who now are lukewarm and indifferent into souls fervent and zealous in His service, if with their whole heart they desire to be converted unto Him. Let such persons acknowledge their own blindness of heart, and let them draw near to the Divine Physician that they may be restored to sight. Would that you might seek the medicine of the soul when you have sinned, as you seek that of the body when you are ill in the flesh. Who now in this so great assembly were he condemned, not to be put to death, but to be deprived of his sight only, would not give all he possessed to escape the danger? And if you so fear the death of the flesh, what do you not fear more than the death of the spirit, especially since the pains of death, that is, of the body, are but of an hour, whilst the death of the soul, that is, its punishment and its grieving, has no end? And if you love the eyes of your body, that you soon will lose in death, why do you not love those eyes of the soul by which you may see your Lord and your God forever? Labor therefore, Beloved Children in the Lord, labor while it is yet day; for as Christ Our Lord says, The night cometh, when no man can work (Jn 4:4). Daytime is this present life; night is death, and the time that follows death. If after this life there is no more freedom to work, as the Truth tells us, why then does every man not labor while he yet lives in this world? Be fearful, Brethren, of this death, of which the Savior says: The night cometh, when no man can work. All those who now work evil are without fear of this death, and because of this, when they depart from this life they shall encounter everlasting death. Labor while yet ye live, and particularly in these days; fasting from delicate fare, withholding yourselves at all time from evil works. For those that abstain from food, but do not withhold themselves from wickedness, are like to the devil, who while he eats not, yet never ceases from evildoing. And lastly, you must know that what you deny yourself in fasting, you must give to heaven in the poor. Fulfill in work, Brethren, the lesson of this day… lest there come upon you the chastisement of the Jews. For they said to the blind man: Be thou his disciple (Jn 9:28). What does being a disciple of Christ mean if not to be an imitator of His compassion, and a follower of His truth and humility? But they said this meaning to curse the man. Instead it is a truly great blessing, to which you may also attain, by His grace Who liveth and reigneth unto ages of ages. Amen. |
| God invites us today to recommit ourselves to the disciplines of this holy season. Keep in mind, the end of our journey is in sight: the feast of the Holy Resurrection –Pascha – Easter. |
Tag: prayer
A good conscience needed for authentic prayer
Conscience demands uncompromising honesty, and that is why it is an integral component of authentic prayer. When we consciously enter the presence of God, it is imperative that we do so as we are, and not with a persona. This means being alert to any sort of self-deception we may bring to prayer, because God desires to meet us as we are. God is not interested in relating with a phantom, a phony, with a persona that has no real existence, which is only trying to cover up what we are afraid to face. To stand before God in our conscience and say, “Here I am” puts us in a position to have a true encounter with the Living God. This is the stuff of transformation. (NS)
Being watchful
“Being watchful is intimately connected with a sustained and disciplined practice of meditation. Taking the time each day to try to discern the movement of the Spirit prepares us to recognize, to intuit God’s presence and respond wholeheartedly. No matter the form your external meditation takes, the fruit of dedicated practice comes in being able to knit together the various moments of each day in conscious, fully awake action.” (NS)
An authentic and fruitful formation in the spiritual life requires us to develop a capacity to be watchful, an awareness, a contemplative gaze. We are bombarded with images and noise: distractions to the point we forget that we are in communion with others. Being watchful as it is noted in the quote above, “sustained and disciplined by practice of mediation.” The Lord revealed to us of the necessity for us to be watchful casting off our sleepiness. The sleepy ignores the Kingdom of God; the person who is not watchful is unconcerned for salvation, that is, our salvation.
Father Luigi Giussani recalls for us that the Gospel says, “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come,” it means be conscious of your destiny, of your relationship with God, with the source, the substance, and the end of what you are…. If we immediately want to feel ourselves filled with richness in our contemplative life, we must always start from the original truth: we were not and now we are. Therefore being—living, existing, moving—is participation in something else. How peacefully exhaustive it is to be able to say with clarity (clarity regarding your motivation, not regarding content, which is the mystery that Christ has revealed to us) that everything we do participates within something else. This is where gratuity is rooted: everything that we do and that we are is given to us; we participate in something else. I believe that there exists nothing more evident than this: no instant in our life do we make ourselves. It is in the vibration of this self-awareness that the possibility of real prayer is developed within us.
St Bruno
Today we liturgically recall great monastic founder and reformer, St Bruno. What we admire and are grateful for in the mission of Bruno is his accent on silence and contemplation in the daily search for the face of God. Pope Benedict offers us a few ideas for meditation. Of course, Benedict few ideas help us to seek the face of the saints in turn who show us the face of God. There is much in Benedict’s meditation for our own journey in the spiritual life and the scope of good, reliable and reason theology.
Redemptoris Mater Chapel, Apostolic Palace
Friday, 6 October 2006, Feast of Saint Bruno
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I have not prepared a real Homily, only a few ideas for meditation.
As clearly appears, the mission of St Bruno, today’s saint, is, we might say, interpreted in the prayer for this day, which reminds us, despite being somewhat different in the Italian text, that his mission was silence and contemplation.
But silence and contemplation have a purpose: they serve, in the distractions of daily life, to preserve permanent union with God. This is their purpose: that union with God may always be present in our souls and may transform our entire being.
Silence and contemplation, characteristic of St Bruno, help us find this profound, continuous union with God in the distractions of every day. Silence and contemplation: speaking is the beautiful vocation of the theologian. This is his mission: in the loquacity of our day and of other times, in the plethora of words, to make the essential words heard. Through words, it means making present the Word, the Word who comes from God, the Word who is God.
Yet, since we are part of this world with all its words, how can we make the Word present in words other than through a process of purification of our thoughts, which in addition must be above all a process of purification of our words?
How can we open the world, and first of all ourselves, to the Word without entering into the silence of God from which his Word proceeds? For the purification of our words, hence, also for the purification of the words of the world, we need that silence which becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born.
St Thomas Aquinas, with a long tradition, says that in theology God is not the object of which we speak. This is our own normal conception.
God, in reality, is not the object but the subject of theology. The one who speaks through theology, the speaking subject, must be God himself. And our speech and thoughts must always serve to ensure that what God says, the Word of God, is listened to and finds room in the world.
Thus, once again we find ourselves invited to this process of forfeiting our own words, this process of purification so that our words may be nothing but the instrument through which God can speak, and hence, that he may truly be the subject and not the object of theology.
In this context, a beautiful phrase from the First Letter of St Peter springs to my mind. It is from verse 22 of the first chapter. The Latin goes like this: “Castificantes animas nostras in oboedentia veritatis”. Obedience to the truth must “purify” our souls and thus guide us to upright speech and upright action.
In other words, speaking in the hope of being applauded, governed by what people want to hear out of obedience to the dictatorship of current opinion, is considered to be a sort of prostitution: of words and of the soul.
The “purity” to which the Apostle Peter is referring means not submitting to these standards, not seeking applause, but rather, seeking obedience to the truth.
And I think that this is the fundamental virtue for the theologian, this discipline of obedience to the truth, which makes us, although it may be hard, collaborators of the truth, mouthpieces of truth, for it is not we who speak in today’s river of words, but it is the truth which speaks in us, who are really purified and made chaste by obedience to the truth. So it is that we can truly be harbingers of the truth.
This reminds me of St Ignatius of Antioch and something beautiful he said: “Those who have understood the Lord’s words understand his silence, for the Lord should be recognized in his silence”. The analysis of Jesus’ words reaches a certain point but lives on in our thoughts.
Only when we attain that silence of the Lord, his being with the Father from which words come, can we truly begin to grasp the depth of these words.
Jesus’ words are born in his silence on the Mountain, as Scripture tells us, in his being with the Father.
Words are born from this silence of communion with the Father, from being immersed in the Father, and only on reaching this point, on starting from this point, do we arrive at the real depth of the Word and can ourselves be authentic interpreters of the Word. The Lord invites us verbally to climb the Mountain with him and thus, in his silence, to learn anew the true meaning of words.
In saying this, we have arrived at today’s two Readings. Job had cried out to God and had even argued with God in the face of the glaring injustice with which God was treating him. He is now confronted with God’s greatness. And he understands that before the true greatness of God all our speech is nothing but poverty and we come nowhere near the greatness of his being; so he says: “I have spoken… twice, but I will proceed no further” [Jb 40: 5].
We are silent before the grandeur of God, for it dwarfs our words. This makes me think of the last weeks of St Thomas’ life. In these last weeks, he no longer wrote, he no longer spoke. His friends asked him: “Teacher, why are you no longer speaking? Why are you not writing?”. And he said: “Before what I have seen now all my words appear to me as straw”.
Fr Jean-Pierre Torrel, the great expert on St Thomas, tells us not to misconstrue these words. Straw is not nothing. Straw bears grains of wheat and this is the great value of straw. It bears the ear of wheat. And even the straw of words continues to be worthwhile since it produces wheat.
For us, however, I would say that this is a relativization of our work; yet, at the same time, it is an appreciation of our work. It is also an indication in order that our way of working, our straw, may truly bear the wheat of God’s Word.
The Gospel ends with the words: “He who hears you, hears me”. What an admonition! What an examination of conscience those words are! Is it true that those who hear me are really listening to the Lord? Let us work and pray so that it may be ever more true that those who hear us hear Christ. Amen!
Christian prayer centers us differently
I am frequently confused by Christians. They complain they don’t know the tradition, that they don’t know if God exists, they equate faith, belief, church, sacrament as all the the same and don’t seem to be able to make distinctions. A Vincentian Father begins a personal dialogue that may be helpful to you, as it is for me. When I was in theology school one of my professors said that most Catholics only pray to one of the persons of the Trinity forgetting that Catholics (and Orthodox) are decidedly Trinitarian. The concept of praying to the Father through Son under the power of the Holy Spirit escapes many… Nevertheless, here is Fr Collins:
Christian prayer is God-centered rather than self-centered. Consistent with the spirit of the first commandment, the very opening address of the Lord’s Prayer escapes from the normal gravitational pull of self-absorption in order to focus on the Creator.
The context is decidedly Trinitarian. It is offered to God the Father, through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is our unique and indispensable window on God. His words and actions are like so many panes of glass in the window of his humanity.
When viewed with the eyes of faith in the light of the Holy Spirit they reveal who Jesus is as the Son of God. As Jesus stated: I am the way, and the truth, and life; no one comes to the Father but by me’ (John 1:6).
Prayer in Practice
Fr. Pat Collins, C.M.
Prayer and Fasting
Prayer and fasting, worship and adoration, Scripture and sacraments and sacramentals all provide the weapons of our spiritual warfare. With them we go on the offensive against the Evil One. But the virtues provide our defense armor. As Blessed Pope Paul VI once observed, St. Paul ‘used the armor of a soldier as a symbol for the virtues that can make a Christian invulnerable.’ They are our best defense against his attacks, for they guard our minds and hearts from his deceptions and temptations. A lapse in virtue is in fact a chink in our armor that makes us vulnerable.
Paul Thigpen
Manual for Spiritual Warfare, p. 57-8
Virgin Mary’s Role in the Defeat of Satan
There is a very interesting conference being planned for next week that needs our attention even though the meeting is for clergy and related persons to the field of the spiritual life and exorcism only and the conference is closed to new registrations. The Pope Leo XIII Institute is hosting a conference, “The Virgin Mary’s Role in the Defeat of Satan” at Mundelein Seminary, August 7-12, 2016.
Keep the participants in prayer.
The Big Three of Lent
I saw this post the other day, “The Big Three of Lent.” Thought I would share:
Fasting is not just a spiritual diet. By denying our bodies, our physical hunger reminds us of the hunger of our souls for God, our longing for a deeper relationship with Our Lord.
Almsgiving teaches us to separate ourselves from material possessions. By freely giving of our money and possessions we learn to trust the Lord more deeply for our own daily needs.
Prayer during Lent is a way to stir up our love and enthusiasm by having a deepening conversation with the Almighty. Remember that the light of God’s love shines more brightly in the darkness of the recognition of our own sinfulness.
Pope’s prayer to Mary, the Immaculate Conception
We know that Pope Francis has a devotion to the Mother of God. No doubt strongly influenced by his Argentinian/Italian and Jesuit background. In some ways he’s no different than most faithful Catholics who have a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin.
Francis has become a frequent papal visitor to the Basilica of Saint Mary Major; yesterday, he went to this basilica and prayed in front of the Marian image of Salus Populi Romani. Thereafter, the Holy Father went to Piazza di Spagna for the traditional act of veneration of the Immaculate Conception. Having made the Act of Veneration of the Immaculate Conception, Francis prayed a special prayer he composed. Here is what he prayed, and this ought to be our prayer, too:
Oh Mary, our Mother,
today the people of God in celebration
venerate the Immaculate,
always preserved from the contagion of sin.
Accept the gift I offer on behalf of the Church in Rome
and throughout the world.
Knowing that You, our Mother, are completely free from sin
gives us great comfort.
Knowing that evil has no power over You,
fills us with hope and fortitude
in the daily struggle that we must fulfill against the threats of the evil one.
But we are not alone in this struggle, we are not orphans, because Jesus,
before dying on the cross,has given You to us as a Mother.
We, therefore, despite being sinners, are your children, sons of the Immaculate,
called to the holiness that shines through You
by the grace of God from the beginning.
Animated by this hope,
we pray today for Your maternal protection for us, for our families,
for this city, for the whole world.
May the power of God’s love,
that preserved You from original sin,
through Your intercession, free humanity from every spiritual and material slavery,
and make us win, in hearts and in events, God’s plan of salvation.
May grace prevail in us, Your children, over
pride and we can become merciful
as our heavenly Father is merciful.
In this time that leads us
towards the feast of the Nativity of Jesus,
teach us to go against the tide:
to divest ourselves, to lower ourselves, to give ourselves, to listen, to be silent,
to decentralize ourselves,
to make room for the beauty of God, the source of true joy.
Oh Immaculate, Our Mother, pray for us!
Reported Benedict XVI mystical experience untrue
Cindy Wooden of Catholic News Service is reporting that the recent press on the mystical experience of the emeritus pope is untrue. She writes,
Archbishop Georg Ganswein, retired Pope Benedict XVI’s longtime personal secretary, said a story about the pope resigning after a “mystical experience” was completely invented.
“It was invented from alpha to omega,” the archbishop said Aug. 24 in an interview on Italy’s Canale 5 television news. “There is nothing true in the article.”
Ms Wooden’s CNS article is here in full.