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Category Archives: Lent

Customs of Good Friday ~ Maria von Trapp / Good Friday Activities ~ Mary Reed Newland

07 Friday Apr 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in by Maria Von Trapp, Lent

≈ 1 Comment

From Around the Year With the Trapp Family

On Good Friday Holy Mother Church gives her children a beautiful opportunity for a profession of faith: the adoration of the cross. Behind the priests and altar boys follows the whole congregation.

We remove our shoes when we go to adore the cross. Three times we prostrate ourselves as we come closer, until we finally bend over and kiss the feet of the crucified.

As we, the church choir, follow right behind the priest, we sing during the rest of the adoration. Our songs are the heartrendingly moving “Crux fidelis” by King John of Portugal, and Eberlin’s “Tenebrae factae sunt,” of such haunting beauty.

When the adoration of the cross is finished, the candles on the altar are lighted, the cross is most reverently taken up from the floor and placed on the altar, and a procession forms to get the Blessed Sacrament from the “Altar of Repose.”

During this procession the hymn “Vexilla Regis” is sung. And then follows a ceremony that is not a real Mass, although it is called the “Mass of the Pre-Sanctified.”

The priest consumes the Host that was consecrated the day before. On the anniversary of Our Lord’s death–the bloody sacrifice–the Church does not celebrate the symbol of the unbloody sacrifice.

After the official service is finished, the altar is stripped again. The tabernacle is left open, no vigil light burns in the sanctuary. But in front of the empty tabernacle lies the crucifix on the steps of the altar, and the people come all during the day for adoration.

In Austria another custom was added.

At the end of the official service the priest would carry the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance, covered with a transparent veil, and expose it on the side altar, where a replica of the Holy Sepulchre had been set up with more or less historical accuracy, with more or less taste, but always with the best of will.

Like the crèche around Christmas time, so the Holy Sepulchre on Good Friday would be an object of pride for every parish, one parish trying to outdo the other.
The people in Salzburg used to go around at Christmas time and in Holy Week to visit the Christ Child’s crib and the Holy Sepulchre in all thirty-five churches of the town, comparing and criticizing.

There would be literally hundreds of vigil lights surrounding the Body of Christ in the tomb of rock, which was almost hidden beneath masses of flowers.

There would be a guard of honor, not only of the soldiers, but also of firemen in uniform and of war veterans with picturesque plumed hats.

I still remember the atmosphere of holy awe stealing over my little heart when as a child I would make the rounds of churches. There in the Holy Sepulchre He would rest now, watched over by His faithful until Holy Saturday afternoon.

Here in America we have found another lovely custom: people going from church to church not on Good Friday but on Holy Thursday.
On that day, the churches are decorated with a profusion of flowers, as a sign of love and gratitude for the Holy Eucharist. The contrast with the bare churches the day after, on Good Friday, is all the more striking and gives a tremendous feeling of desolation.

Good Friday is a very quiet day with us.

There is little to do in the kitchen, since fasting is observed rigorously on this day.
We have no breakfast, and all that is served for lunch, on a bare table without tablecloth, is one pot of thick soup, “Einbrennsuppe,” which everyone eats standing up in silence. There is little noise around the house.

Talking is restricted to the bare essentials, as it would be if a dearly beloved was lying dead in the house.
As we are so privileged as to have a chapel in our house, we use the day when the holy house of God is empty and desolate to clean and polish all the sacred vessels and chalices and the ciborium, the monstrance, candlesticks, and censer.

The vigil light before the picture of the Blessed Mother in the living room is also extinguished, because on Good Friday Christ, the Light of the World, is dead.

From twelve until three, the hours of Our Lord’s agony on the cross, all activity stops. We sit together in the empty chapel before the cross and spend these hours in prayer, meditation, and spiritual reading. From time to time we rise and sing one or the other of the beautiful Lenten hymns and motets.

On Holy Saturday, a new stir of activity starts in the kitchen. Eggs are boiled in different pots containing various dyes–blue, green, purple, yellow, and red.

Every member of the household who wants to participate in this art takes some eggs to his or her room, after they have dried, to work on them in secret.

One takes some muriatic acid with which she etches the most intriguing patterns out of the colored foundation. It is quite popular in our house to etch the first line of Easter songs–staves, notes, and words.

Our cleverest artist sits with paint and brush, and under her fingers appear pictures of an Easter lamb, or of Our Risen Savior Himself, or of the Blessed Mother, or of the different patron saints of the family. Sometimes they turn out to be little gems.

Others fasten dried ferns or little maple leaves or other herbs around the eggs before they are boiled in dye. When these leaves are finally taken off, the shape of the flowers and herbs remains white, while the rest of the egg is colored. This is easily done and looks very pretty.

These eggs first appear on trays and in bowls on Easter Sunday morning at the foot of the altar for the solemn blessing of the food. Afterwards they will be distributed at the solemn Easter breakfast.

For those mothers who cannot make the Triduum services because of little children and duties at home, here are a few things to get your creative mind going…

The Year & Our Children: Catholic Family Celebrations for Every Season
For the hours spent at home by those who cannot get to the rites of Good Friday, it is good to plan special activities in order to help all keep a spirit of recollection. With many little children, silence is almost impossible, but as they grow older, they begin to cooperate.

Friends of ours have had their children make the garden of Joseph of Arimathea outdoors, separately, on Good Friday. They used whatever they could find at hand – stones, mosses, sticks, acorns.

(My interjection – We talked about a Resurrection Garden today and here is a Pinterest page with many interesting ideas for one.)

A drawing project will keep Peter occupied. Having said the Stations of the Cross during Lent, he applies himself seriously to illustrating them.

(Follow the link here for the coloring pages.)

Rereading the passages about the Passion will keep another child busy, read out of Scripture or from a favorite life of Christ.

(Here is a good translation for the Passion.)

For a boy who is fidgety and must be active, a solitary chore that is a penance is better: perhaps cleaning the goat stalls or spreading hay and manure from the goose’s pen on the garden.

I know many mothers who, because they must be at home with their babies during this time, save a task that especially tries them.

Each has his or her way of best spending the hours of Good Friday, but it will work out most successfully if the program for the day is well planned.

Perhaps one of the tasks for several of the children can be copying Psalm 21 to be used at night prayers this evening. Our Lord quoted the first line of it from the Cross. It prophesied Christ’s Passion and death and our salvation: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me….”

This was the great prayer of our Lord on the Cross. The family may divide itself and read the lines alternately.

Prayer from Divine Intimacy…

images“O Christ, Son of God, as I contemplate the great sufferings You endured for us on the Cross, I hear You saying to my soul: ‘It is not in jest that I have loved you!’

These words open my eyes, and I see clearly all that Your love has made You do for me. I see that You suffered during your life and death, O Man-God, suffered because of that profound, ineffable love. No, O Lord, it was not in jest that You loved me, but Your love is perfect and real.

In myself, I see the opposite, for my love is lukewarm and untrue, and this grieves me very much.

O Master, You did not love me in jest; I, a sinner, on the contrary, have never loved You except imperfectly. I have never wanted to hear about the sufferings You endured on the cross, and thus I have served You carelessly and unfaithfully.

Your love, O my God, arouses in me an ardent desire to avoid anything that might offend You, to embrace the grief and contempt that You bore, to keep continually in mind Your Passion and Death, in which our true salvation and our life are found.

O Lord, Master, and Eternal Physician, You freely offer us Your blood as the cure for our souls, and although You paid for it with Your Passion and Death on the Cross, it cost me nothing, save only the willingness to receive it.

When I ask for it, You give it to me immediately and heal all my infirmities.

My God, since you agreed to free me and to heal me on the one condition that I show You, with tears of sorrow, my faults and weaknesses; since, O Lord,  my soul is sick, I bring to you all my sins and misfortunes.

There is no sin, no weakness of soul or mind for which You do not have an adequate remedy, purchased by your death.

All my salvation and joy are in you, O Crucified Christ, and in whatever state I happen to be, I shall never take my  eyes away from Your Cross.” (St. Angela of Foligno)

“The very presence of a woman who knows how to combine an enlightened piety with mildness, tact, and thoughtful sympathy, is a constant sermon; she speaks by her very silence, she instills convictions without argument, she attracts souls without wounding susceptibilities; and both in her own house and in her dealings with men and things, which must necessarily be often rude and painful, she plays the part of the soft cotton wool we put between precious but fragile vases to prevent their mutually injuring each other.” – Monseigneur Landriot, Archbishop of Rheims, 1872 -Loreto Publications

Fulton Sheen’s Last Words on Christ’s passion…

Coloring pages for Holy Week…



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If you have trouble reading saint books and find the story lines boring, you need to try these!

We love these books and have had them on our book shelves for years! They are very well-written and make the saints come alive!

Louis de Wohl has the amazing capacity to take historic Catholic figures and breathe life into them by creating a novel around what their life might have been like.

They are meant for high school and adult level. Some of the books could have  adult content, for instance, St. Augustine’s life before conversion. Parents may want to read them first.

Louis de Wohl Historical Religious Novels

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support.

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Holy Thursday ~ Fr. Frank Weiser

06 Thursday Apr 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in Lent, Seasons, Feast Days, etc.

≈ 1 Comment

Beautiful Traditions for a very holy day….

Article by Francis Weiser, The Easter Book

NAMES  

Holy Thursday bears the liturgical name “Thursday of the Lord’s Supper” (Feria Quinta in Coena Domini). Of its many popular names the more generally known are:

Maundy Thursday (le mand; Thursday of the Mandatum) ~

The word mandatum means “commandment.” This name is taken from the first words sung at the ceremony of the washing of the feet, “A new commandment I give you” (John 13, 34); also from the commandment of Christ that we should imitate His loving humility in the washing of the feet (John 13, 14-17). Thus the term mandatum (maundy) was applied to the rite of the feet-washing on this day.

Green Thursday ~

In all German-speaking countries people call Maundy Thursday by this name (Grundonnerstag). From Germany the term was adopted by the Slavic nations (zeleny ctvrtek) and in Hungary (zold csiitortiik).

Scholars explain its origin from the old German word grunen or greinen (to mourn), which was later corrupted into griin (green). Another explanation derives it from carena (quaclragena), meaning the last day of the forty days’ public penance.

 Pure or Clean Thursday ~

This name emphasizes the ancient tradition that on Holy Thursday not only the souls were cleansed through the absolution of public sinners, but the faithful in all countries also made it a great cleansing day of the body (washing, bathing, shaving) in preparation for Easter.

Saint Augustine (430) mentioned this custom. The Old English name was “Shere Thursday” (meaning sheer, clean), and the Scandinavian, Skaer Torsdag.

Because of the exertions and thoroughness of this cleansing in an age when bathing was not an everyday affair, the faithful were exempted from fasting on Maundy Thursday.

Holy or Great Thursday ~

The meaning of this title is obvious since it is the one Thursday of the year on which the sacred events of Christ’s Passion are celebrated.

The English-speaking nations and the people of the Latin countries use the term “Holy,” while the Slavic populations generally apply the title “Great.”

The Ukrainians call it also the “Thursday of the Passion.” In the Greek Church it is called the “Holy and Great Thursday of the Mystic Supper.”

MASSES

In the early Christian centuries the bishop celebrated three Masses on Maundy Thursday. The first (Mass of Remission) for the reconciliation of public sinners; the second (Mass of the Chrism) for the blessing of holy oils; the third (Mass of the Lord’s Supper) in commemoration of the Last Supper of Christ and the institution of the Eucharist.

This third Mass was celebrated in the evening, and in it the priests and people received Holy Communion. It is interesting to note that in ancient times Holy Thursday was the only day of the year when the faithful could receive the Blessed Sacrament at night after having taken their customary meals during the day ( since it was not a fast day).

Today the Mass of the Chrism is still solemnly celebrated in every cathedral. During this Mass the bishop blesses the holy oils (oils of the sick, holy chrism, and oil of the catechumens ).

In the evening the Mass of the Lord’s Supper is celebrated in all churches. It is one of the most solemn and impressive Masses of the year, since the very “birthday” of the Holy Sacrifice is com-memorated in it.

The altar is decorated, crucifix and tabernacle are veiled in white, and the priests wear rich vestments of white, the liturgical color of joy.

At the beginning of the Mass the organ accompanies the choir, and through the Gloria a jubilant ringing of bells proclaims the festive memory of the institution of the Blessed Sacrament.

After the Gloria the bells fall silent and are replaced by a wooden clapper and not heard again till the Gloria of the Easter Vigil is intoned on Holy Saturday.

Only one priest celebrates Mass in each church on Holy Thursday; the other priests and the lay people receive Communion from his hand, thus representing more vividly the scene of our Lord’s Last Supper.

The faithful are expected and invited (but not strictly obliged) to attend this Mass and receive Holy Communion.

REPOSITORY  

After the Mass, the Blessed Sacrament is carried in solemn procession to a side altar, richly decorated with candles and flowers, where it is kept in the tabernacle until the Good Friday service.

This “repository” altar is a highly venerated shrine in every church, visited by thousands of people. A popular custom in cities is to visit seven such shrines. Throughout the night, in many countries, groups of the clergy and laymen keep prayerful watch in honor of the agony of Christ.

In the Latin countries of Europe and South America the Maundy Thursday shrine is called monumento. It is much more elaborate than the shrines of other nations.

Usually a special scaffolding with many steps, representing a sacred hill, is erected, so high that it almost reaches to the ceiling. On the top of this the Sacrament is elevated, raised above a glorious forest of candles, palms, orchids, lilies, and other decorations.

Dressed in black, the city people visit at least seven such monumentos, which, in many places, are open through the night. On their way from church to church they say the rosary.

DENUDING OF ALTARS

 After the Mass and procession on Holy Thursday, the altars are “denuded” in a ceremony of deep significance. Priests robed in purple vestments remove the altar linen, decorations, candles, and veils from every altar and tabernacle except the repository shrine.

Robbed of their vesture, the bare altars now represent the body of Christ, Who was stripped of His garments.

In medieval times the altars used to be washed with blessed water and wine, the priests using bundles of birch twigs or palms to cleanse and dry them.

In the Vatican this ceremony is still performed by the canons of St. Peter’s on Holy Thursday.

MANDATUM

 Finally, there is the ancient rite of the Mandatum, the washing of the feet. It is prescribed by the rules of the Roman Missal as follows:

After the altars are denuded, the clergy shall meet at a convenient hour for the Mandatum. The Gospel Ante diem festum (John 13, 1-17) is sung by the Deacon.

After the Gospel the prelate puts off his cope and, fastening a towel around him, he kneels before each one of those who are chosen for the ceremony, washes, wipes and kisses the right foot.

From ancient times, all religious superiors, bishops, abbots, and prelates, performed the Maundy; so did the popes at all times. As early as 694 the Synod of Toledo prescribed the rite.

Religious superiors of monasteries washed the feet of those subject to them, while the popes and bishops performed the ceremony on a number of clergy or laymen (usually twelve).

In medieval times, and in some countries up to the present century, Christian emperors, kings, and lords washed the feet of old and poor men whom they afterward served at a meal and provided with appropriate alms.

In England, the kings used to wash the feet of as many men as they themselves were years old. After the Reformation, Queen Elizabeth I still adhered to the pious tradition; she is reported to have used a silver bowl of water scented with perfume when she washed the feet of poor women on Maundy Thursday.

Today, all that is left of this custom in England is a distribution of silver coins by royal officials to as many poor persons as the monarch is years old.

The washing of feet is still kept in many churches.

In Mexico and other sections of South America the Last Supper is often re-enacted in church, with the priest presiding and twelve men or boys, dressed as Apostles, speaking the dialogue as recorded in the Gospels.

In Malta, a “Last Supper Table” is richly laden by the faithful with food that is later distributed to the poor.

RECONCILIATION OF PENITENTS

An ancient rite of Maundy Thursday now totally extinct was the solemn reconciliation of public penitents. As on Ash Wednesday, they again approached the church dressed in sackcloth, barefoot, unshaven, weak, and feeble from their forty days’ fast and penance.

The bishop led them into the house of God, where he absolved them from their sins and crimes after the Gospel of the Mass of Reconciliation.

With his blessing they joyfully hurried home after the Mass to bathe, shave, and cut their hair in preparation for Easter, and to resume their normal dress and routine of daily life, which had been so harshly interrupted during the time of their public penance.

ROYAL HOURS  

The Greek Church celebrates a night vigil from Holy Thursday to Good Friday, in which the texts of the Passion, collected from the Bible and arranged in twelve chapters (called the “Twelve Gospels”) are sung or read, with prayers, prostrations, and hymns after every chapter.

In the cathedral of Constantinople, the East Roman emperors used to attend this service; hence it was called the “Royal Hours.” Its original name is Pannuchida (All-Night Service).

In Russia people would carry home the candles that they had used in this vigil, and with them they would light the lamps that burned day and night before the family ikons (holy pictures).

The Ukrainians celebrate the “Royal Hours” on Good Friday morning.

FOLKLORE

Many popular customs and traditions are connected with Maundy Thursday. There is, above all, the universal children’s legend that the bells “fly to Rome” after the Gloria of the Mass.

In Germany and central Europe the little ones are told that the church bells make a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Apostles, or that they visit the pope, to be blessed by him, then sleep on the roof of St. Peter’s until the Easter Vigil.

In France the story is that the bells fly to Rome to fetch the Easter eggs that they will drop on their return into every house where the children are good and well behaved.

In some Latin countries sugared almonds are eaten by everybody on Maundy Thursday. From this custom it bears the name “Almond Day” in the Azores.

In central Europe the name “Green Thursday” inspired a tradition of eating green things. The main meal starts with a soup of green herbs, followed by a bowl of spinach with boiled or fried eggs, and meat with dishes of various green salads.

Following the ecclesiastical custom, the bells on farm buildings are silent in Germany and Austria, and dinner calls are made with wooden clappers.

In rural sections of Austria boys with clappers go through the villages and towns, announcing the hours, because the church clock is stopped. These youngsters (Ratschen-buben) sing a different stanza each hour, in which they commemorate the events of Christ’s Passion.

Coloring pages for Holy Week…





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Holy Week ~ Maria Von Trapp

02 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in by Maria Von Trapp, Lent

≈ 1 Comment

Photos courtesy of Kelcey McCune




by Maria von Trapp, Around the Year With the Von Trapp Family

According to an old tradition, the first three days of Holy Week– Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday–are dedicated to spring cleaning. In the days before the invention of the vacuum cleaner, this was a spectacular undertaking: sofas, easy chairs, and all mattresses would be carried out of the house and beaten mercilessly with a “Teppichpracker” (carpet-beater).

Walls were dusted, curtains were changed–a thorough domestic upheaval. There is little time for cooking, and meals are made of leftovers.

By Wednesday night the house looks spick and span. And now the great “Feierabend” begins. “Feierabend” is an untranslatable word. It really means vigil–evening before a feast, the evening before Sunday, when work ceases earlier than on any other weekday in order to allow time to get into the mood to celebrate.

“Feier” means “to celebrate,” “Abend” means “evening.”

From now on until the Tuesday after Easter no unnecessary work will be done on our place. These days are set aside for Our Lord. On Wednesday, with all the satisfaction of having set our house at peace, and after the dishes of a simple early supper are finished, we go down to the village church in Stowe for the first Tenebrae service.

In the sanctuary, a large wrought-iron triangular candlestick is put up, with fifteen dark candles. We take our places in the choir, and the solemn chanting of matins and lauds begins.

This is the first part of the Divine Office, which has been recited daily around the world by all priests and many religious since the early times of the Church.

In the cathedrals and many monasteries it is chanted in common. For the last days of Holy Week, it is performed in public, so to speak–not only in cathedral churches, but in any church, so that the faithful may take part in it.

We always consider this the greatest honor for us, the singing family, the greatest reward for all the trouble that goes along with life in public, that we can sing for all the Divine Offices in church.

Matins has three nocturnes, each one consisting of three psalms with their antiphons and three lessons. The first nocturne is always the most solemn one. We sing all the psalms on their respective “tonus”. We sing the antiphons, some in Gregorian chant, some from the compositions of the old masters such as Palestrina, Lassus, Vittorio.

The lessons were sung last year by Father Wasner, Werner, and Johannes.

In the second and third nocturne we only recite the psalms in “recto tono” in order not to make it too long. Some of the antiphons and all of the lessons, however, are sung.

After each psalm the altar boy extinguishes a candle, reminding us of how one Apostle after the other left Our Lord. Matins is followed by lauds, consisting of five psalms and antiphons which we recite. At the end of lauds there is only one candle left–the symbol of Our Lord all by Himself crying out, “Where are you, O My people!” And we, in the name of all the people, recite now the “Miserere,” the famous penitential psalm, while the altar boy is carrying the last candle behind the altar and the church is now in complete darkness.

At the end of the “Miserere” we all make a banging noise with the breviary books. This custom is quite ancient. It is supposed to indicate the earthquake at the moment of the Resurrection. After this noise, the altar boy emerges from behind the altar with the burning Christ-candle and puts it back on the candlestick. This is a ray of hope anticipating the glorious Easter night. (In Austria the Tenebrae service is called “Pumpernette,” or “noisy matins.”)

The congregation is following closely with booklets in which the whole service, which we sing in Latin, is given in English. This is the most moving evening service of the whole year. When we sing “Tenebrae factae sunt,” an awesome silence falls upon the whole church, and when we sing the famous “Improperia `Popule meus'” by Palestrina we all are moved to the depths.

Is there anything more heartrending than to listen to the outcry of the anxious Redeemer: “My people, what have I done to thee, or in what have I grieved thee, answer Me. What more ought I to do for thee that I have not done?”

On the morning of Holy Thursday, the Church in her service tries most movingly to combine the celebration of the two great events she wants to commemorate “Who lives in memory of Him,” Our Lord had said on the first Holy Thursday when He gave Himself to us in the Holy Eucharist; and, “Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

This cry He uttered only a few hours later. Therefore, as the Solemn Mass begins, the festive strains of the organ accompany the chant of the Introit and Kyrie, and when the priest intones the Gloria, all the bells on the steeple, as well as in the church, ring together once more for the last time because, right afterwards, Holy Church, as the Bride of Christ, goes into mourning as she accompanies the Bridegroom through His hours of unspeakable suffering. The organ remains silent when she reminds the faithful in the Gradual: “Christ became obedient unto us to death, even unto the death of the Cross….”

The Gospel of this day tells of the lesson Jesus gave us in brotherly love and humility as He first washed the feet of His disciples, afterwards saying: “Know you what I have done to you? You call me Master, and Lord; and you say well, for so I am. If then I being your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; you also ought to wash one another’s feet.

For I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you do also.” Therefore, in all cathedrals and abbey churches the bishops and abbots go down on their knees on this day after Holy Mass and wash the feet of the twelve oldest members of their communities.

It is wonderful that in our days more and more parishes are adopting this beautiful custom, which brings home to us better than the most eloquent sermon that we should remember this word of Our Lord “For I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you do also,” which should become increasingly the watchword in our daily life.

This is what the Church wants us to take home with us on that day the attitude of washing one another’s feet; and, because we Catholics have not awakened to this fact, we are rightly to be blamed for all wrong and injustice and wars going on in the world!

As Good Friday has no Mass of its own, but only the “Mass of the Pre-Sanctified,” an extra big host was consecrated by the priest during Mass on Holy Thursday, which is put into a chalice and covered up with a white cloth. This chalice is now incensed immediately after Mass and carried in solemn procession to the “Altar of Repose,” while the “Pange Lingua” is chanted solemnly.

This repository should remind us of the prison in which Our Lord was kept that terrible night from Thursday to Friday. Unlike that first night, where He was all alone after all the Apostles had fled, the faithful now take turns in keeping watch.

There is an old legend circulating in the old country, still fervently believed by the children, that all the bells fly to Rome on Holy Thursday, where the Holy Father blesses them; they return in time for the Gloria on Holy Saturday.

Another custom still alive in the villages throughout Austria is this: As the bell cannot be rung for the Angelus on these three days, the altar boys man their outdoor “Ratschen” (a kind of rattle looking like a toy wheelbarrow, whose one wheel grinds out deafening noise) and race through the streets, stopping at certain previously designated corners, lifting up their “Ratschen” and chanting in chorus:

Wir ratschen, ratschen zum englischen Gruss,

Den jeder katholische Christ beten muss.

(We remind you by this noise of the Angelus,

Of a prayer to be said by every faithful Christian.)

Needless to say, many a little boy’s heart waits eagerly for these three holy days. While he might be too young to understand the great thoughts of Holy Week, he certainly is wide awake to his own responsibility of reminding his fellow-men, “Time to pray!”

My son Werner is living with his family just a little way down the road. When his little boys, Martin and Bernhard, are big enough to shoulder the responsibility, their father will make them such an old-world “Ratschen” and their mother will teach them the rhyme going with it.

In the house also, the bells have to be silent. The bell rung for the meals or for family devotions is replaced by a hand clapper worked by the youngest member of the family, who announces solemnly from door to door that lunch is ready.

Holy Thursday has a menu all its own. For the noon meal we have the traditional spring herb soup (Siebenkraeutersuppe).

Spring Herb Soup

Dandelions

Chervil

Cress

Sorrel

Leaf nettle

The mixture of the above herbs should total about 7 ounces. Whether bought at the market or picked, they should be washed well. Steam in butter with finely chopped onions and parsley. Press through a sieve into a flour soup and let it boil. You may put in one or two egg yolks, one to two tablespoons of cream, or 1/4 cup milk. You also may use sour cream.

Afterwards there is the traditional spinach with fried eggs. In Austria, Holy Thursday is called “Gruendonnerstag” (Green Thursday). Many people think that the word “gruen” stands for the color, but this is not so. It derives from the ancient German word “greinen,” meaning “to cry or moan.” Nevertheless, “Gruendonnerstag” will have its green lunch.

The evening of Holy Thursday finds us in our Sunday best around the dining-room table. Standing, we listen to the Gospel describing the happenings in the Upper Room. On the table is a bowl with “bitter herbs” (parsley, chives, and celery greens), another bowl with a sauce the Orthodox Jews use when celebrating their Pasch, and plates with unleavened bread (matzos can be obtained from any Jewish delicatessen store, but can also be made at home).

Unleavened Bread

1-1/2 cups flour              1 egg, slightly beaten

1/4 tsp. salt                 1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup warm water

Mix salt, flour, and egg (and butter). Add the water, mix dough quickly with a knife, then knead on board, stretching it up and down to make it elastic until it leaves the board clean. Toss on a small, well-floured board. Cover with a hot bowl and keep warm 1/2 hour or longer. Then cut into squares of desired size and bake in 350-degree oven until done.

Then comes the feast-day meal of a yearling lamb roasted, eaten with these bitter herbs and the traditional sauce. Each time we dip the herbs in the sauce, we remember Our Lord answering sadly the question of the Apostles as to who was the traitor: “He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, he shall betray me.”

Afterwards the table is cleared and in front of Father Wasner’s place is put a tray filled with wine glasses and a silver plate with unleavened bread. While breaking up portions of bread, he blesses the bread and wine individually and hands it to each one around the table and we drink and eat, remembering Our Lord, Who must have celebrated such a “love feast” many times with His Apostles.

This was the custom in His days; just as we in our time will give a party on the occasion of the departure of a member of the family or a good friend, the people in the time of Christ used to clear the table after a good meal and bring some special wine and bread, and in the “breaking of the bread” they would signify their love for the departing one.

The first Christians took over this custom, and after having celebrated the Eucharist together, they would assemble in a home for an “agape,” the Greek word for “love feast.” To share bread and wine together in this fashion therefore, was not in itself startling to the Apostles, but the occasion was memorable on this first Holy Thursday because it was Our Lord’s own great farewell.

As we thus celebrate the breaking of the bread around our table at home, we keep thinking of the words He had said immediately before: “A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you….”

Every Holy Thursday night spent like this knits a family closer together, “careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, one body and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith…” as St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians.

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“Who shall blame a child whose soul turns eagerly to the noise and distraction of worldliness, if his parents have failed to show him that love and peace and beauty are found only in God?” – Mary Reed Newland, http://amzn.to/2mTKR3w (afflink)

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What happened to Veronica’s veil was simply an outward expression of what happened in Veronica’s soul. Are we “Veronica’s” in our everyday life? Do we seek to serve, to encourage, to listen….?

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Coloring pages for Holy Week….

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In With God in Russia, Ciszek reflects on his daily life as a prisoner, the labor he endured while working in the mines and on construction gangs, his unwavering faith in God, and his firm devotion to his vows and vocation. Enduring brutal conditions, Ciszek risked his life to offer spiritual guidance to fellow prisoners who could easily have exposed him for their own gains. He chronicles these experiences with grace, humility, and candor, from his secret work leading mass and hearing confessions within the prison grounds, to his participation in a major gulag uprising, to his own “resurrection”—his eventual release in a prisoner exchange in October 1963 which astonished all who had feared he was dead.

Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him…..

Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. Only through an utter reliance on God’s will did he manage to endure the extreme hardship. He tells of the courage he found in prayer–a courage that eased the loneliness, the pain, the frustration, the anguish, the fears, the despair. For, as Ciszek relates, the solace of spiritual contemplation gave him an inner serenity upon which he was able to draw amidst the “arrogance of evil” that surrounded him. Ciszek learns to accept the inhuman work in the infamous Siberian salt mines as a labor pleasing to God. And through that experience, he was able to turn the adverse forces of circumstance into a source of positive value and a means of drawing closer to the compassionate and never-forsaking Divine Spirit.

He Leadeth Me is a book to inspire all Christians to greater faith and trust in God–even in their darkest hour. As the author asks, “What can ultimately trouble the soul that accepts every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strives always to do his will?”
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Why Am I Unhappy? ~ Jesus Dies on the Cross

26 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in Lent, Seasons, Feast Days, etc., Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 1 Comment

From The Stations of the Cross and Their Relation to Family Life

By Joseph A. Breig, 1950’s

The harsh word you spoke to your wife…the nagging you inflicted on your husband…the feud you had with your neighbor…the impatient blow you struck one of your children, or the loveless punishment to which you subjected him because he did something that annoyed you….

These are among the things for which Christ died, and for which Mary, in intolerable anguish, watched Him die. These things are not the least of the things that scourged Him and crowned Him with thorns, and hung Him on the Cross. They are not the least of the things that condemned Our Lady to stand helpless before Him, unable to ease His pain, to comfort His heart, to wipe away the blood from His face that His nailed hands could not touch.

Oh, we are angry, and rightly angry, over the inhumanities, the abominations, inflicted upon men and women and children, and upon the cardinals and bishops and priests of Christ, by the Stalins and the Hitlers and the Titos. But usually there is nothing that we can directly do to stop that sort of thing.

It is not so with the inhumanities that we commit against those nearest to us–our own fathers and mothers, our own wives and husbands, our own children and neighbors. Those inhumanities, we can do something about. We can stop them.

We complain, too, about the attacks of anti-Catholics upon the Church–the lies they tell about her, the preposterous charges they voice, the calumnies and slanders and insinuations they publish. Sometimes we can do something to correct such situations, and sometimes we can’t. But always we can do something about our own coldness to Christ. And cold we are. Cold!

Each day the Church offers us the Mass; offers us the opportunity to join with Mary and Joseph, with the angels and saints, in adoring and thanking Christ as He immolates Himself again for us. Are we there? How few are present in the parish church each morning! How few families are represented by even one member! And why are we not represented? Because we are slothful. Just plain slothful.

Sloth is that insidious, that sneaking, that small and mean and cheap weakness which counsels us to be careless and indolent about spiritual things. Sloth whispers to us that we need our sleep; that we are too tired to rise twenty or thirty minutes earlier in the morning in order to be at Mass. What a thieving and lying thing is sloth, and how it deludes us into depriving ourselves, through our own fault, of riches beyond the wildest power of words to describe!

Each day the Church offers Communion to us; offers Christ Himself to be the invigoration and the sanctification of our souls, the enlightenment of our minds–indeed, even the protection of our bodies, our families, our homes and our country. But sloth, that miserable thing, makes fools of us and leaves us lying abed, missing the greatest things that life can give to us.

We ask ourselves, when we stop to think, why did I quarrel with my wife or husband? Why was I short-tempered, even mean, perhaps even cruel, with the children? Why did I fall into this sin or that sin? Why am I so petty, so uncharitable, so quick to pride and anger and vanity? Why do I complain about everything, and appreciate almost nothing?

Why am I unhappy? Why do I not walk through life singing and smiling, uplifted by the beauty of things? Why am I short and surly with the woman I love and the children I love–with the very persons who, if they were dead before me, my heart would be broken, my life would be desolated?

Why, why, why? The answer is immediately at hand. The answer is our failure, through laziness and self-indulgence, to take advantage of the sources of grace that would transform our souls into shining things,that would open our minds and hearts to the nobility of existence.

The Mass is there, Holy Communion is there, the Sacrament of Penance is there, the Blessed Sacrament is there, the Stations of the Cross are there, the Rosary is within reach whenever we want to stretch out our hands to it.

Christ died to redeem us and to offer us holiness. He died in a world-shaking agony to try to drive home to us the great lesson of what we are. He died to try to make us see ourselves as He sees us. And how does Christ see us?

Let us look at ourselves through the eyes of Christ. What was it God said when He created us? “Let us make man to our image and likeness.”

Now, everything that exists is a reflection of God. The sunset, the flowers reflect His beauty. The wind, the waterfall reflect His power.

The mountains, and great seas, reflect His majesty. The night sky, the stars, the blazing sun, the moon, the trees, the rocks and sands, the animals and insects, the corn growing on the prairie, the tomato ripening on the vine, the worm industriously fertilizing the soil–all reflect something of God’s infinite perfection.

God said, “Let us make man to our image and likeness.” And He gathered up in man something of all these reflections. From all the created kingdoms he took a part of man, so that when Adam and Eve stood before Him, all creation stood there.

Man is mineral, man is vegetable, man is sensitive like the animals, man is spiritual. The nobility of man’s nature is beyond the power of words to express fully. And yet this, all this, is only a beginning.

On the Cross, Christ took man and added the divine. Through His sacraments, He supernaturalizes the inexpressible natural nobility of man. Man now becomes God’s own son and daughter; we are made princes and princesses of Christ’s eternal and infinite kingdom.

Why, it would not be too much to say that angels are stricken with awe at the sight of us, because we are filled with Christ, we are temples of the Holy Spirit, and in us the Son of Man and the Son of God takes up His abode, as He promised, with the Father and the Holy Ghost.

This, then, is a Christian. This is a baptized man or woman. This is one who can walk into the House of God, and go forward toward the altar, and receive the Risen Christ, true God and yet true man–our Creator, our Redeemer and our Brother–for food and drink for the soul.

That is what we are; and yet we snap at one another, we fill our homes with disputes and contentions, with grabbings, with jealousies and suspicions, with ungodliness and inhumanities toward one another.

What preposterous foolishness! What imbecility!

No; we cannot talk around it; we cannot refuse to face it. Christ dying on the Cross is dying to make us like unto Him; to make our homes like the House at Nazareth; to make our families like the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

There is no use in our sitting around telling ourselves that sanctity is for monks and hermits, for priests and Brothers and Sisters. Yes, sanctity is for them; but sanctity is for us, too.

It is our business, we who are husbands and wives and children, we who are family and home people–it is our business to “Christize” ourselves and our houses and our neighborhoods. That is the business that we ought to be about. If we were about it as we ought to be, gradually we would “Christize” all the world; we would create world peace; we would disarm and harmonize the nations.

The Mass and the Sacraments are there at our beck and call, to give us the power and wisdom and zeal we need. Only one thing remains: Are we going to do something about it, or are we going to leave untapped, or hardly touched, the power that would flow to us from Christ Crucified if only we would open our hearts to it?

The Way of the Cross

“Thereupon Pilate gave Jesus up.”
God is no respecter of persons, but man is. When the Magi spoke of the Savior’s birth, “all Jerusalem was troubled” – but only because Herod was troubled. And another Herod had not wanted to kill John the Baptist; he consented only “out of respect for his guests.”
The whole purpose of life, thought the Pharisees, was to impress people with a show of piety. Human respect led Peter to deny Christ. And human respect led Pilate to condemn Him to death.
When the crowd shouted, “If you free Him, you’re no friend of Caesar,” Pilate’s resistance gave way, and he left Jesus to their mercy.
Human respect – fearing what others will think about our actions – often generates sin, and robs even virtue of its merit.
Do I act to please God – or men?

Painting by Tintoretto, 1566

PASSION SUNDAY
When the children were still very small, I said to them on the way to church on a Passion Sunday morning, “Now watch and tell me what is different today in church!” On the way home they said eagerly that the statues and crosses on the altars were covered with violet cloth.
“And why don’t we do it at home, Mother? Shouldn’t we cover the crucifix and statues in the living room and in our bedrooms, too?”
As I had no good reason to offer against it, we bought a few yards of violet cloth the next day and did at home what we had seen in church. In the following years we were ready for the covering ceremony on Saturday before Passion Sunday.
The older ones among the children also had noticed that the prayers at the foot of the altar were much shorter and that there was no “Gloria Patri” after the Introit and the Lavabo.
To let the children watch for such changes in the liturgy makes them much more eager than if they are told everything in advance.
Promptly, when we came in our evening prayers to the “Gloria Patri,” a warning, hissing “Sssh” from the children’s side made us aware that “Gloria Patri,” even if only in family prayers, should be omitted for these holy days of mourning.
I am sure it would be the case in every family, as it was in ours, that the children are the ones who most eagerly want to carry into the home as much of holy liturgy as they possibly can.
~Maria von Trapp
Photo from https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=fssp%20dallas%3A%20mater%20dei%20catholic%20church

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Painting by By Weistling Morgan

 

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Laetare Sunday to Palm Sunday ~ Maria Von Trapp

19 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in by Maria Von Trapp, Lent

≈ 2 Comments

In this article, Maria von Trapp brings to us the lovely customs of the mid to latter part of Lent that enrich a Catholic home and make the Faith fully alive to all….

From Around the Year With the Trapp Family, 1955, Sophia Institute Press

In the middle of Lent comes the Sunday Laetare, also called “Rose Sunday.” It is as if Holy Mother Church wants to give us a break by interrupting the solemn chant of mourning, the unaccompanied cadences and the use of the violet vestments, bursting out suddenly in the word “Laetare” (“Rejoice”), allowing her priests to vest in rose-colored garments, to have flowers on the altar and an organ accompaniment for chant.

It is also called “Rose Sunday” because on that day the Pope in Rome blesses a golden rose, an ornament made of gold and precious stones.

The Holy Father prays that the Church may bring forth the fruit of good works and “the perfume of the ointment of the flowers from the root of Jesse.” Then he sends the golden rose to some church or city in the world or to a person who has been of great service to the Church.

Only recently I discovered that this Sunday used to be known as “Mothering Sunday.” This seems to go back to an ancient custom. People in every city would visit the cathedral, or mother church, inspired by a reference in the Epistle read on the Fourth Sunday of Lent: “That Jerusalem which is above, is free, which is our Mother.”

And there grew up, first in England, from where it spread over the continent, the idea that children who did not live at home visited their mothers that day and brought them a gift.

This is, in fact, the precursor of our Mother’s Day. Expecting their visiting children, the mothers are said to have baked a special cake in which they used equal amounts of sugar and flour (two cups of each); from this came the name “Simmel Cake,” derived from the Latin word “similis”, meaning “like” or “same.”

Here is the recipe:

Simmel Cake

3/4 cup butter                1/3 cup shredded lemon &

2 cups sugar                       orange peel

2 cups flour                  1 cup currants

4 eggs                        almond paste

1/2 tsp. salt.

Cream the butter and sugar until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Sift the flour and salt and add to the first mixture. Dust the peel and currants with a little flour and add to the batter. Line cake tin with waxed paper and pour in half the dough. Add a layer of almond paste and remaining dough. Bake at 300 degrees F. for one hour. Ice with a thin white icing, flavored with a few drops of almond extract.

PASSIONTIDE

Passion Sunday To Holy Saturday

The liturgy follows Christ’s early life step by step. At Christmas season we learn of the birth in the stable, the adoration of the shepherds, the slaughter of the innocents, the flight into Egypt, the adoration of the Magi, and finally the return from Egypt.

Then we meet Our Lord again at His baptism, we accompany Him into the desert on his fast, and we go with Him for the first and second years of His public life, we listen to His parables, we admire His miracles, and we unite our hearts with Him in His life of toil and missionary love for us.

Now four weeks of instruction have passed. We have followed Our Lord in His apostolic ministry and we have reached the moment when, together with Holy Mother Church, we shall contemplate the sorrowful happenings of the last year (during Passion Week) and the last week (during Holy Week) of His life on earth.

We can feel the hatred of Christ’s enemies growing day by day. On Good Friday we shall witness once more the most frightening of all happenings, foretold by the prophets and even by Our Lord Himself, the bloody drama of Calvary.

The purpose of Passiontide is to call to our memory the persecutions of which Our Lord was the object during His public life and especially toward the end. If Septuagesima season acts as a remote preparation for Easter, and Lent the proximate one, the last two weeks of Passiontide are the immediate preparation.

PASSION SUNDAY

When the children were still very small, I said to them on the way to church on a Passion Sunday morning, “Now watch and tell me what is different today in church!” On the way home they said eagerly that the statues and crosses on the altars were covered with violet cloth.

“And why don’t we do it at home, Mother? Shouldn’t we cover the crucifix and statues in the living room and in our bedrooms, too?”

As I had no good reason to offer against it, we bought a few yards of violet cloth the next day and did at home what we had seen in church. In the following years we were ready for the covering ceremony on Saturday before Passion Sunday.

The older ones among the children also had noticed that the prayers at the foot of the altar were much shorter and that there was no “Gloria Patri” after the Introit and the Lavabo.

To let the children watch for such changes in the liturgy makes them much more eager than if they are told everything in advance.

Promptly, when we came in our evening prayers to the “Gloria Patri,” a warning, hissing “Sssh” from the children’s side made us aware that “Gloria Patri,” even if only in family prayers, should be omitted for these holy days of mourning.

I am sure it would be the case in every family, as it was in ours, that the children are the ones who most eagerly want to carry into the home as much of holy liturgy as they possibly can.

For instance, when I answered their question as to how the ashes are obtained which are to be blessed on Ash Wednesday, telling them that the blessed palms from the previous Palm Sunday are burned, they asked a most logical question “But, Mother, if you burn a blessed object, aren’t the ashes already blessed? And if so, shouldn’t we burn all the blessed palms around the place too and sprinkle the ashes over the garden?” And so we did!

After we had established this as a firm family custom, I read that this is done in many places in the Austrian Alps, only there the people strew the ashes not over the garden but over the fields.

PALM SUNDAY

Then comes the week which is called in the missal “Hebdomada Major”–our “Holy Week” in which we accompany Our Lord day by day through the last week of His life, as it is told in the Gospels. First we join Him in His triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

As soon as the Church had been freed by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, the Christians began to celebrate Palm Sunday in a very dramatic way in Jerusalem.

On the very spot where it had happened, the holy texts were read: “Rejoice, daughter of Sion, behold Thy King will come to thee….”

The crowd spread their garments on the ground, crying aloud, “Blessed be the King Who cometh in the Name of the Lord.” The bishop, mounted on an ass, would ride up to the church on the Mount of Olives, surrounded by a multitude carrying palms and singing hymns and joyful anthems.

From Jerusalem this re-enactment of Christ’s solemn entry into His holy city came to Rome, where the Church soon adopted the same practice. The ceremony, however, was preceded by the solemn reading of the passage from Holy Scriptures relating the flight from Egypt, thus reminding Christ’s people that Christ, the new Moses, in giving them the real manna, is delivering them out of the Egypt of sin and nourishing them in the Eucharist.

Around the ninth century the Church added a new rite. The palms, which the people would hold in their hands when they accompanied their bishop, were solemnly blessed.

We have already witnessed several of these specially solemn blessings, on Epiphany, on Candlemas Day, on Ash Wednesday. Again these texts are so rich in beautiful thoughts for meditation that families should read them together–not only read them, but read them prayerfully.

From Rome the idea to re-enact Our Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem spread all over the Christian world. In medieval times the faithful and the clergy met at a chapel or a wayside shrine outside of town where the palms were blessed, and from there moved in a solemn procession to the cathedral.

Our Lord was represented either by the bishop riding on an ass or, in some places, by the Blessed Sacrament carried by the king or, in other places, by a crucifix carried ahead. In some Austrian villages the figure of Christ sitting on an ass, carved in wood, is carried.

The Christian people had an unerring instinct for the efficacy of those solemnly blessed sacramentals, and just as they carried home Epiphany water and holy candles, they also would bring home with them blessed palms.

In the old country this was quite an elaborate function of “the liturgy in the home.” As we did not have real palms growing in Austria, we used evergreens and pussy willows, which at that time were the first children of spring.

Like all other Austrian families living in the country, we made as many little bouquets as there were divisions on our grounds–one for the vegetable garden, one for the orchard, one for the flower garden, one for each pasture, and one for each field. Each of these little bouquets was fastened to a stick about three feet high.

Besides, there were many single twigs of pussy willow which would be placed behind pictures all around the house. These bouquets were gaily adorned with colored ribbons or dyed shavings from the carpenter shop.

The children carried them into the church and vied with each other, during the blessing, as to who held his stick highest to get most of the holy water sprinkled on it. Then bouquets were carried in a liturgical procession and afterwards were brought home.

In the afternoon the whole family would follow the father throughout the house and all over the grounds and he would place in the middle of every lot one of those sticks carrying the blessed bouquets as a means of protecting his property against the influence of evil spirits, against the damage of hail storms and floods.

While the family would proceed from lot to lot, they would say the rosary. We would alternate between decades of the rosary and the chants of the day, “Pueri Hebraeorum” and “Gloria, laus et honor.” On

Easter Sunday the family would revisit these sticks, bringing along little bottles filled with Easter water (holy water blessed solemnly on Easter morning). These little bottles would be tied to sticks, thus adding another sacramental.

Quote from The Year and Our Children by Mary Reed Newland

This prayer is a very old and beautiful invocation to St. Joseph. It is said to have been found in the fiftieth year of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In 1505 it was sent from the Pope to Emperor Charles when he was going into battle. St. Joseph was invoked for protection against a sudden death, drowning, poisoning; for protection against falling into the hands of the enemy, being burned in a fire or overpowered in battle. This prayer can be said for nine days as a novena prayer…

“Your joy in your children should outweigh by far any disadvantages they may cause. In them you will find your own happiness.” – Rev. George A. Kelly, http://amzn.to/2neRNrZ The Catholic Family Handbook. (afflink)

 






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The Family and the Cross ~ Rev. Msgr. Irving A. Deblanc

16 Thursday Mar 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in Family Life, Lent

≈ 1 Comment

This is a beautiful meditation for Lent and well worth your time!

by Rev. Msgr. Irving A. Deblanc, 1950’s

Ask mothers and fathers if they would like to become saints. Many apologetically answer, “Would that I had the time! I am too busy rearing the children, keeping house, making ends meet.”

This recalls the days when some considered sanctity a luxury for the rich, who in being able to afford servants, could spend long hours in church and in prayer: they were often considered to be the holy ones.

Pope Benedict XV defined holiness as doing the will of God according to one’s state of life. In the state of grace and with the right intention, married people can become saints doing their everyday home work.

They often gain more graces with a dish cloth than with a Rosary, as one may sometime gain more graces getting up in the middle of the night to care for a baby than spending an hour in church. It is a matter of doing the right thing at the right time. Yes, but even more, it is fulfilling a sacramental vocation.

This cannot be said in the same sense about being a lawyer, or a secretary, or a farmer. Marriage is a vocation; it is holy; it is a sacrament; it is a means of going to heaven.

It is interesting that only three of the sacraments are entitled ‘holy: Holy Eucharist, Holy Orders, Holy Matrimony – not that the others are not holy but these are specifically designated.

As a priest gets graces when he hears confessions, preaches, reads his breviary, so a couple under the right conditions is flooded with God’s graces when they love each other, nurse a baby, teach the children. This because they too are fulfilling their vocation.

It is because more and more people see marriage as a vocation that we can hope for more and more saints among those living family life.

In Peru four natives have already been canonized and one beatified in a hundred years. In the U.S.A. so far we still have had no natives canonized. I am afraid we are not even remotely thinking in the direction of trying to be worthy to be a canonized saint.

Married couples are sometimes unaware that suffering is one of their great home-made tools for sanctity. It is looked upon as an annoyance, but Christian marital love necessarily involves suffering, for the essence of unity is not so much to enjoy each other, but to suffer together.

Still joy and suffering are not two sides of a unity called love. What was once desire before marriage becomes offering after marriage.

Some have described love as having three aspects: the digestive, the reciprocal, and the oblative. It is in the oblative sense, this self-giving and suffering that a couple purifies love.

Without these elements, love would die, for passion can only promise; love can keep that promise.

To refuse the call of self-immolation is the sin of obduracy and a rejection of love. One is then of no use to God, to society, to each other, or to oneself. To say no to this human impulse is to corrupt all one touches. It is the cult of selfishness.

The Cross can teach us to love our neighbor; it can teach us compassion. Three-fourths of us, it is said, need it, but there is a strange, unhappy feeling that in too many souls this ingredient is left out.

The Cross is our main tool of sanctity at home. Christian love understands the Cross if it is seen in the context of Heaven.

For pagans the Cross is a scandal. It absorbs them like whirlpools in a river at flood height. Suffering, however, must draw men outside of themselves. It is a reminder of Divinity itself. Not good in itself, the Cross can be priceless as a means of grace.

The bell rings in the life of every one of us and all of us are someday called upon to suffer. The non-Christian tries to escape suffering and he becomes hard and selfish. He seeks comfort only and his spiritual energy dries up, but he must learn to suffer or it will destroy him.

The egotist detaches himself from spiritual reality and becomes a hollow being-an empty body. Like the statue of Buddha, he looks down only at his own stomach and does not see the needy around him.

Not all can see the value of suffering. Suffering is often so inward, so hard to articulate. It has been a special mystery to all, especially pagans. Their many explanations have never been satisfactory.

The Stoic saw in suffering a test of sheer courage; he was completely indifferent to it. The Epicurean saw his answer in pleasure, and the Dolorist tried to delude himself and saw evil as good and actually exulted in that which diminished him. Others saw in suffering only a mere punishment.

A good Catholic makes friends with pain. He holds God’s gifts close to himself but always with open hands. When God allows us sufferings it is not to do us harm but to gather us into His arms.

Suffering never gags a Christian; upon it he sharpens his teeth. Like a cargo stabilizing a ship against storms, so suffering stabilizes us against the storms of passion.

Humanity will ever question suffering, as Job did so dramatically and so officially. But Job gave an answer. Pagan philosophers never learned it. Christ gave the answer for all times: suffering calls less for a philosophy, more for a living of it as worthwhile.

So vast was this question, says Paul Claudel, the great convert to Catholicism, that the Word alone could answer it, but He did so not by an explanation, only by His presence. This presence helped Mary who stood beneath the first Red Cross crimsoned by the blood of her Son; it helped Veronica who so lovingly held a cool, moist compress to the throbbing, fevered brow of Christ; it helped Simon of Cyrene, who later gave his life to serve others; this same Simon must have seen the pallid face of Christ among the poor and on every crumpled pillow where a sick man’s head lay.

We learn with St. Francis de Sales that the love of Jesus begins in the Passion. We learn with Bishop Neumann of the deep beauty of the Litany of the Sacred Heart – a prayer he vowed to say every day.

With St. Alphonsus we become more conscious of the Cross. It is constantly in his writing. When he saw a nail, a rope, a thorn, he thought instantly and tenderly of the Passion. The Cross returns us to the nothingness that we are and yet it lifts us into eternity.

In many churches of the country a large, special cross is carried in church for the Stations. There is no corpus on the cross; each person is reminded that he must replace Christ on the cross. He must learn how to suffer and why he suffers. He must be an extension of Christ.

Christ has plunged Himself into humanity and wants us to make Him real today. He wants us to continue His Redemption, but this is done not by writing a good book, or organizing well, or by a great oration.

One is a Christian when he or she represents Christ, witnesses Christ. Deeply we surrender our will, not with a mere external offering like that of Cain, but with an internal – external oblation like that of Abel – like that of Christ. The external gift is a symbol of the internal giving. We represent Christ so perfectly that we become a mystery to those around us.

In the everyday romance of the world we pierce our valentines with an arrow. The Sacred Heart is the first, true Valentine sent by the Father. But His love is pictured by a heart and a cross rather than an arrow.

His heart is not only the symbol of love but the Cross of hope. The Cross is not the symbol of death; it is the symbol of life. The Stations do not end with a dead Christ in the tomb, but a glorious, living Christ on Easter Sunday, and always in our tabernacles.

He is every city’s most distinguished resident who invites His best friends constantly to take up your Cross and follow Me. The Cross is Christ’s way of identifying Himself and His own. Christians realize it is a gift, not a curse for with Dante ‘sorrow remarries us to God.

St. Francis de Sales on the company we keep: “Be very careful, therefore, dear reader, not to have any evil love, because you will in turn quickly become evil yourself.
Friendship is the most dangerous of all love. Why? Because other loves can exist without communication, exchange, closeness. But friendship is completely founded upon communication and exchange and cannot exist in practice without sharing in the qualities and defects of the friend loved.”

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What happened to Veronica’s veil was simply an outward expression of what happened in Veronica’s soul. Are we “Veronica’s” in our everyday life? Do we seek to serve, to encourage, to listen….?

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Our Lord Needs Our Help ~ Simon of Cyrene and the Cross

12 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in Lent, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 1 Comment

Simon of Cyrene Helps Carry the Cross by Joseph Breig, 1950’s

Now here is a strange thing. Here is a bewildering thing. Here is a downright dumbfounding thing. Christ the omnipotent, He who could say to a mountain, “Remove from here,” and it would remove – Christ no longer can carry His cross. Christ needs somebody to help Him to carry out His mission of salvation.

Christ is falling, Christ is fainting, Christ is failing. Christ needs an assistant; Christ the rescuer of all mankind needs rescuing. And in this moment of shattering drama, does God send an angel, or a prophet, a flaming personality such as John the Baptist? No, God sends a man of whom nobody ever has heard. God selects a chance passerby to lift Christ’s burden and to walk beside Christ on the way to Golgotha.

What mystery is this, that the most ordinary and casual onlooker is lifted to immortality, is chosen to lend his strength to the All-Powerful One when the All-Powerful One is helpless?

Cannot the divine Christ, the healer of lepers, the giver of sight to the blind, the restorer of life to the lifeless, cannot He finish his work unless he is assisted by this Simon of Cyrene who has blundered onto the scene, and who, we may guess, has small taste for carrying crosses for condemned criminals?

Mystery it is indeed; mystery of mysteries. It is as mysterious, this incident, as St. Paul’s remark about filling up in his own body what is wanting in the passion of Christ. What can possibly be wanting in the passion of Christ? Although we know that God could have repaired fallen human nature by a simple act of His Will, yet He demands for our personal salvation an act of our will, a cooperation with His grace.

This is the mystery of human freedom, without which man is not really man at all. Man to be man must be able to make choices. Man to be what he is, the image and likeness of God, must distinguish between good and evil, and choose good.

How else is man to have any dignity? How else is man to be like unto God? How else is man to be happy-for does not happiness consist in the knowledge that one has done the good that one ought to do, and avoided the evil that one ought to avoid? How can man share forever in the happiness of God unless he has identified himself with that happiness by freely choosing God and God’s way?

It is like asking whether any of us can enjoy the beauty of a sunset without ever having gazed upon a sunset, or the lilting joy of symphony music without having listened to it. What the conductor of an orchestra feels, we cannot feel without sharing, according to our capacity, in his experience.

We cannot have any of his happiness in music without ourselves entering into music. Neither can we enter into God’s eternal joy without choosing for ourselves the cause of that joy, which is God’s goodness.

There are those who blindly complain about this; who would prefer that God force His happiness upon them without their doing anything to make themselves capable of it. But this is impossible. As well might we ask that we know the joys of love while refusing to love; or the pleasure of knowledge while declining to learn.

If you do not know a single word of English, and resolutely refrain from acquiring any English, it would be foolish of you to complain because you cannot enter into the joy of reading Shakespeare in his own tongue. You are simply incapable, through your own choice, of sharing in the experience and the insights of Shakespeare.

Thus it is with God and man. Christ has opened the door; Christ has led the way; Christ has given us all the means for fitting ourselves for the happiness of heaven. But if we turn our backs, if we walk the other direction, if we reject the means, then we shall find that with respect to God’s happiness, we are like blind men trying to enjoy the sight of flowers, we are like the deaf wanting to listen to music, we are like paralyzed persons longing for dancing and the poetry of movement.

We must do our part. We must lift a burden as Simon lifted; we must walk with Christ as Simon walked. We must fill up in ourselves, as St. Paul filled up, what is wanting of the passion of Christ.

The point is that what is wanting in the passion of Christ is my little bit, and your little bit. In one sense, Christ climbed alone to Calvary. In another sense, He climbed in the midst of a countless multitude of other climbers, each carrying his own little cross, his own little duty, his own contribution to the unselfish immolation of love. The passion of Christ took place at a certain time and in a certain place; but it extends backward to Adam and Eve, and forward to the last man and woman.

What we ought to see when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice is not the sacrifice of Christ alone, but the sacrifice of Christ expanded into countless other hearts and souls. This is the meaning of the Mystical Body of Christ; this is the meaning of the Church.

The Church is Christ saving all of us by enlisting our willing cooperation. The Church is Christ and you and I and a vast concourse of others, indomitably struggling upward and onward toward the death that is the opening into life everlasting. Every last one of us is, or ought to be, a Simon of Cyrene, walking through life with Christ, enduring bravely life’s vicissitudes and keeping our eyes always on the goal until it is achieved.

Unless the Simons do their part, the Simons cannot accomplish what Christ gave them the power to accomplish. All this is a mystery, and yet it ought to be as plain as a pikestaff.

Let us express it in this manner – the confessionals are always open, and guilt can be blotted out of our souls in an instant, but not if we will not enter the confessional. And even if we enter the confessional, nothing is accomplished without contrition.

Nobody else can be contrite for us; we ourselves must turn from evil to embrace good. The instant we do that, we become capable of the life of God which is the life of love and goodness; we begin, in fact, to share God’s supernatural life on earth. We have a foretaste of eternal joys; we enter into an anteroom to heaven.

But as long as evil is what a man loves, then what he loves is not goodness, and he cannot know the happiness that comes of goodness embraced. To make a homely comparison, if I cannot abide the taste of olives, then olives cannot give me pleasure. If I want the pleasure that olives give, I must change.

And if I am to share the happiness of God, then I must fit myself to be happy by God’s happiness; I must become like God. I must determine to be a Simon of Cyrene who will be ready to walk with Christ and not to turn away from Christ.

Simon might have been a lover of comfort who would have so weakened his body with self-indulgence and luxury as to have been incapable of lifting the weight of Christ’s cross. He was fit for Christ, when the test came, because his muscles were strong, and his soul willing.

To each of us comes our moments of Simon-likeness, when we are called upon to do our bit in sharing the passion of Christ which leads to resurrection and glorification with Christ. It is our duty and our high privilege to be always prepared.

A mother holds her baby in her arms, looks up to God, and knows that she, by months of suffering and patience, has co-operated with Him in making and bringing into the world a little body housing a priceless soul. A father stands above his new-born son resting in the arms of his wife, and knows as he picks him up and weighs him tenderly that he has shared with God the Father His very fatherhood; for this mite of humanity, immortal in destiny, is truly his son. Mother and father together have co-operated with God in the astonishing creation of a human being. -Fr. Daniel A. Lord, 1950’s

A Finer Femininity Meditation for Lent

What happened to Veronica’s veil was simply an outward expression of what happened in Veronica’s soul. Are we “Veronica’s” in our everyday life? Do we seek to serve, to encourage, to listen….?

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Lessons from Our Lord’s Agony ~ Fr. Daniel Considine

05 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in Lent, Peace....Leaving Worry Behind

≈ 1 Comment

From Words of Encouragement, 1934

Notes of Instructions delivered by Rev. Daniel Considine, S.J.

To some of us will come at times some taste of that horrible perplexity Our Lord had in the Garden of Olives. At times it will seem almost impossible to do what we know God wants us to do.

There was a moment when Our Lord seemed to waver and balance as to whether He would go on with His Passion.

It must cost us something, if we mean to do something memorable for God. That is the time of the greatest anguish of mind, when we are balancing the question. Thereafter came that complete calm which Our Lord never lost during His Passion, save in that moment of His dereliction on the Cross.

The devil does his best to mislead us. He says, if you were able to do it, you wouldn’t have all this extraordinary difficulty. On the contrary, the disturbance comes from the world, the flesh, and the devil, and they wouldn’t make such a stir if the matter were not so important.

Therefore, when we have to take resolutions which cost us much, let us look at the Garden of the Agony, and take comfort from Our Lord. And observe, all was in the natural course of events, God allowing creatures to work out their designs. We need not think He interposed to provide special ignominy for Our Lord.

As soon as the conflict had ceased, and Our Lord had fully accepted the sacrifice, He was perfectly self-possessed. Let us too be calm, and united with God, and that will give us strength to endure that suffering we had dreaded and shrunk from.

To all outward appearances Our Lord’s life was a failure; so will it often be with us. Yet it is just then we are most like Him, and in our very failure will He our success in the sight of God.

Our Lord’s agony was an anticipation of suffering: especially helpful in these days, so full of subjective troubles. ‘My soul is sorrowful even unto death.’ ( Matt. xxvi, 30).

A sadness of itself such as to produce death. His soul, generally in such peace and calm, was taken possession of by suffering that was enough to take His life. What was the cause? The knowledge, the anticipation of His Passion. He began to fear and to be heavy (Mark xiv. 33.) -a sickness of heart- agony-fear. Jesus was mortally sad. This fact ought to be of the greatest comfort and consolation to us.

To find a parallel to our sufferings in the Blessed Son of God! It is a lifelong asset of consolation that can’t be prized too highly.

If that most perfect soul of Our Lord could, without grossest injustice, be so dimmed by sadness that there and then the soul might have parted from the body, what right have you or I to think our lot hard? Whatever our trial is, the thought ought to follow us all day, whether our trouble be physical or mental. When I am sad, I am only undergoing the same experience as my Lord and Master.

Much less is it wrong that I should undergo this sadness. It is the very best proof of love I can give Him, and if it knits me nearer to Him, I ought to look upon it as a gift from God.

There are so many of us over whose life hangs a continual shadow. Our lives wrecked-everything gone wrong-got myself into such a mess-impossible I can do anything for God. Jesus in that mortal sadness showed the depth of His love for us more than at any other time.

Some of us think that if we feel sad when we have something to do for God which is hard and unpleasant, we are doing wrong.

If my sorrow comes from anticipated trouble, my Lord’s sorrow was from the same cause. . . . The devil likes us not to humble ourselves, because when the saints did it they were exalted as if they were walking on air. . . .

When Our Lord came to grips with His pain, He did pray, “If it be possible, let this chalice pass from me.” (Matt. xxvi. 39.). When we have no courage, the devil says go back. No; go on. It is nonsense to say the mortifications of the saints cost them nothing.

To feel dreadfully afraid, and as if we cannot do what we have made up our minds to do, proves nothing. Remember Our Lord’s prayer. Finding Himself in this dreadful depression, He set Himself to pray, and cast Himself down on His face.

The repulsion was so great, it set up a kind of wrestling – a struggle, that brought a pressing of the blood from the veins in such abundance that it soaked His garments, and dropped on the grass.

Some people think that the saints drank down pain like a sweet draught. A mistake. Our Lord shrank from the pain presented to Him. The use of the will had to be so strong that His whole Body was bathed in blood.

He began to be afraid.( Mark xiv. 33). Fear seized upon Him by His own permission. He was pale, and shudders went through His Body. There is nothing so terrible as to see a man afraid. They seem to lose the power of guiding themselves.

It might have seemed impossible that Our Lord should have felt fear. If, with great reverence, we could watch Him – how He stoops for love of us!

Learn from this that fearing our trouble is no sign of unfaithfulness to God.

Meanwhile He prays. His very trial consisted in putting aside the consolation He might have had. What makes our darkness so dense is that God does not let us have the consolations we had expected to feel in time of trial.

An angel appeared, strengthening and comforting Him. We come away from the Tabernacle perhaps without an atom of consolation or sweetness, but He always strengthens us.

No matter what sins you may have committed, He forgives you all; and no matter how late you come to His service; He will in one moment help you to amend the past.

When I suffer much, when things that are painful and disagreeable, befall me, instead of assuming an air of sadness, I respond by a smile. At first I was not always successful, but now it is a habit, which I am very happy to have acquired.

True beauty comes from within. If that beauty is lacking, no exercise program, eating plan, or wardrobe update can put it there. No interior decorating scheme can give it to me. “The unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit… is of great worth in God’s sight.” 1 Peter 3:4 – Emilie Barnes http://amzn.to/2sKSwHf (afflink)

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Jesus Meets His Blessed Mother ~ The Family and the Cross / 5-Minute Prayer for Lent

24 Friday Feb 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in Lent, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Jesus meets His mother, joseph breig, Stations of the Cross, The Family and the Cross, Way of the Cross

What a beautiful, noble and self-sacrificing mother we have been given! Blessed Mother, keep us on the Royal Way until we reach our eternal destination.

The Family and the Cross – Jospeh Breig

Jesus Meets His Blessed Mother

It is utterly impossible for any human being to come within a mile of appreciating fully the sacrifice made by Mary when she gave her divine Son for our salvation.

God alone can understand it. We cannot, because in order to do so we would have to be as pure as Mary, as totally sinless as she, and equally capable of love. We are not.

But there is one thing that we can understand and appreciate, and that is that neither Mary nor Christ sniveled when they met while He was on His way to crucifixion.

Jesus was wounded infinitely more, and Mary immeasurably more, than any one of us possibly can be, but they did not indulge in self-pity or in recriminations against God for appointing them to carry so dreadful a burden. Christ is God, and as God He perceived clearly and completely why He was going to His death, and what incalculable good He was accomplishing.

Christ is man, and as man He was intolerably laden with our sins.

But Mary is human only; and as a woman we salute her and boast of her.

In the hours of Christ’s Passion, she did indeed give mankind something of which to be proud forevermore. She is one of us, who are less than the angels; but she earned a place unthinkably higher in eternity than the place of the highest and holiest angel.

The poet who called Mary “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” was inexpressibly more right than he could possibly have realized. Not any of us can ever grasp with our minds the fullness of Mary’s nobility and dignity.

No honor that we can pay to her, save only the divine honor which belongs to God alone, is too much honor. Because of her, a representative of our human race is enthroned in the highest place possible for any creature. One of our own is Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, co-Redeemer with Christ, and co-Ruler of the everlasting kingdom.

Unless we understand something about Mary, we cannot understand much about the Passion of Christ. Christ’s physical sufferings, dreadful though they were, were small and superficial compared with his psychological and spiritual agony.

If we cringe at the thought of the tortures inflicted upon Him, if our hearts ache at the sight of the beatings and piercings, then we ought to feel utterly broken in the presence of his invisible torments.

They were invisible, but they become visible to the eye of one who meditates upon Mary. For Mary’s passion was entirely psychological and spiritual; it was completely invisible, yet so terrible that had Christ’s sufferings been merely of the body and not of the soul at all, then Mary’s agony would have been an agony more frightful than His.

We cannot begin to see into the depths of what Jesus sacrificed for us until we turn our minds into the heart of Mary to perceive what she endured in contributing to our redemption. It is not enough to say that Mary suffered the equivalent of death. She suffered more and worse than the equivalent of death.

Death has its bodily terrors, but the most terrible terror of death is the rending apart of a creature in his deepest depths; it is the separation of body and soul, compared with which nuclear fission is a mild and slight division.

Now the agony of Mary was an agony incomparably more dreadful than the rending of a man’s being by death. What death tears apart is an arrangement of nature; and that is a frightful tearing. But it is as nothing compared with the forcible separation of total love from total love.

And that was what happened when Our Lady was separated from her Son. Mary’s whole matchless being, capable of unthinkably greater love than any other creature, was utterly in love with her Son.

To be separated from her Son, to see her Son reviled and wounded, was for her worse than an eternal succession of physical deaths. Indeed, it is impossible to understand how Mary’s physical heart endured the sight of the tormented Christ without physically breaking and bringing on bodily death.

I personally would speculate that her heart was miraculously preserved from breaking.

However that may be, what Mary endured was of the type of what Christ endured in the Garden of Gethsemane, when His human nature was so inexpressibly tormented by His horror of sin that He sweat blood.

It does not seem to me that Our Lady’s body, unless divinely sustained, could have survived the spiritual and psychological torture she endured in seeing her Son led to execution in unthinkable suffering. I think that God’s intervention must have been necessary to keep her from dying on the spot when she met Jesus on His way to Calvary.

We approach now the depths of this matter. For not only did Mary endure a million deaths upon millions of deaths, but she never for a moment doubted God and God’s goodness. Not for an instant did she rebel. Not even remotely did she allow her faith to be shaken. Her will never turned the tiniest fraction of an inch from her utter consecration to God and to God’s inscrutable purposes.

In the midst of a spiritual agony which ought to have shaken the universe into chaos, she freely gave her Son for our redemption. She gave Him back to the impenetrable purposes of God from Whom He had come to her. She made, willingly, indomitably, and with a courage that makes the mind reel, the incomparably, most supreme sacrifice of which it is possible for any created being to be capable.

Mary gave absolutely everything, she sacrificed all, she held nothing for herself, because her all, her everything, was Christ.

And as I said, she did not snivel. She indulged in no theatrics. Not once did she cry out that this was too much, that she could not stand it, that to ask this of her was asking more than flesh and blood could endure.

There on the way to Calvary, two beings of unthinkable nobility looked into each other’s eyes and faced squarely, without the slightest retreat or deviation, the most awful duty of which it is possible to conceive.

Christ and Mary had a work to do. They had a world to save. They had a spiritual family to bring forth in unutterable anguish. Upon them fell the grinding, crushing labor of giving birth to the children of God who are to share with God His own divine life and happiness forever and forever.

That was their task, the task of Jesus and Mary; and although it meant for each of them such suffering and rending as is utterly outside the grasp of the human mind, they proceeded to it bravely, without the slightest outcry of protest.

This indeed was nobility. This indeed was royalty. Christ and Mary did not shrink from, nor complain about, taking up your burden and my burden and everybody’s burden.

They simply took up the burdens without question because they loved not themselves and their comforts, but God and their fellowmen.

And this is what we must try to learn from them – the hidden merciful designs of God, which come out of His infinite love and wisdom, not for our destruction, but for our perfection and glorification.

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5-minute-prayer2

by Cardinal Mercier:

I am going to show you a secret to holiness and happiness.
For five minutes every day let your imagination be quiet, close your eyes to everything they see, and shut your ears to of all the world’s noise so that you can withdraw into the sanctuary of your baptized soul, the temple of the Holy Ghost.

And speak to that Holy Spirit and say to Him:

“Holy Spirit, soul of my soul, I adore Thee.
Enlighten me, guide me,
strengthen and comfort me.
Tell me what I ought to do and order me to do it.
I promise to submit to anything that Thou requirest from me,
and to accept everything that Thou allowest to happen to me.
Just show me what Thy will is.”

If you do this your life will be quiet and peaceful,
and comfort will abound even in the middle of troubles.
For grace will be given to match any stress together with strength to bear it, grace that will take you to the gates of Paradise, full of merit. Such submission to the Holy Spirit is the secret of holiness.prayer book 4

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“God has so constituted us, that in loving and caring for our own children—the richest and best things in our natures are drawn out. Many of the deepest and most valuable lessons ever learned, are read from the pages of a child’s unfolding life. There is no influence more potent than that which touches us when our children are laid in our arms. Their helplessness appeals to every principle of nobleness in our hearts. Their innocence exerts over us a purifying power. The thought of our responsibility for them, exalts every faculty of our souls. In the very care which they exact, they bring blessing to us.” J.R. Miller

 

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Ash Wednesday ~ Divine Intimacy

22 Wednesday Feb 2023

Posted by Leanevdp in Lent, Seasons, Seasons, Feast Days, etc.

≈ 8 Comments

Santa Teresa de Jesús, by Adolfo Lozano Sidro

From the wonderful Meditation book, Divine Intimacy by Father Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, O.C.D.

MEDITATION

“Dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return” (Genesis 3:19).

These words, spoken for the first time by God to Adam after he had committed sin, are repeated today by the Church to every Christian, in order to remind him of two fundamental truths–his nothingness and the reality of death.

Dust, the ashes which the priest puts on our foreheads today, has no substance; the lightest breath will disperse it. It is a good representation of man’s nothingness: “O Lord, my substance is as nothing before Thee” (Psalm 38:6), exclaims the Psalmist.

Our pride, our arrogance, needs to grasp this truth, to realize that everything in us is nothing. Drawn from nothing by the creative power of God, by His infinite love which willed to communicate His being and His life to us, we cannot–because of sin–be reunited with Him for eternity without passing through the dark reality of death.

The consequence and punishment of sin, death is, in itself, bitter and painful; but Jesus, who wanted to be like to us in all things, in submitting to death has given all Christians the strength to accept it out of love.

Nevertheless, death exists, and we should reflect on it, not in order to distress ourselves, but to arouse ourselves to do good. “In all thy works, remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” (Sirach 7:40).

The thought of death places before our eyes the vanity of earthly things, the brevity of life–“All things are passing; God alone remains”–and therefore it urges us to detach ourselves from everything, to scorn every earthly satisfaction, and to seek God alone. The thought of death makes us understand that “all is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone” (Imitation of Christ I, 1,4).

“Remember that you have only one soul; that you have only one death to die … then there will be many things about which you care nothing” (St. Teresa of Jesus, Maxims for Her Nuns, 68), that is, you will give up everything that has no eternal value. Only love and fidelity to God are of value for eternity. “In the evening of life, you will be judged on love” (St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Maxims: Words of Light, 57).

COLLOQUY:

“O Jesus, how long is man’s life, although we say that it is short! It is short, O my God, since, by it, we are to gain a life without end; but it seems very long to the soul who aspires to be with You quickly….

O my soul, you will enter into rest when you are absorbed into the sovereign Good, when you know what He knows, love what He loves, and enjoy what He enjoys. Then your will will no longer be inconstant nor subject to change … and you will forever enjoy Him and His love.

Blessed are they whose names are written in the Book of Life! If yours is there, why are you sad, O my soul, and why are you troubled? Trust in God, to whom I shall still confess my sins and whose mercies I shall proclaim. I shall compose a canticle of praise for Him and shall not cease to send up my sighs toward my Savior and my God.

A day will come, perhaps, when my glory will praise Him, and my conscience will not feel the bitterness of compunction, in the place where tears and fears have ceased forever….

O Lord, I would rather live and die in hope, and in the effort to gain eternal life, than to possess all creatures and their perishable goods. Do not abandon me, O Lord! I hope in You, and my hope will not be confounded. Give me the grace to serve You always and dispose of me as You wish” (St. Teresa of Jesus, Exclamations of the Soul to God 15 – 17).

If the remembrance of my infidelities torments me, I shall remember, O Lord, that “as soon as we are sorry for having offended You, You forget all our sins and malice. O truly infinite goodness! What more could one desire? Who would not blush with shame to ask so much of You?

But now is the favorable time to profit from it, my merciful Savior, by accepting what You offer. You desire our friendship. Who can refuse to give it to You, who did not refuse to shed all Your Blood for us by sacrificing Your life? What You ask is nothing! It will be to our supreme advantage to grant it to You” (St. Teresa of Jesus, Exclamations of the Soul to God 14).

“The Holy Family lived in a plain cottage among other working people, in a village perched on a hillside. Although they did not enjoy modern conveniences, the three persons who lived there made it the happiest home that ever was. You cannot imagine any of them at any time thinking first of himself. This is the kind of home a husband likes to return to and to remain in. Mary saw to it that such was their home. She took it as her career to be a successful homemaker and mother.”
-Fr. Lawrence G. Lovasik. The Catholic Family Handbook

A quick homily on needing a sense of humor during this time along with not just doing the minimum requirements…

I want to thank you all so much for any reviews you have given me on my etsy shop and also on Amazon. I know it takes time to leave a review and so I very much appreciate it!  We especially enjoy the pictures!

 

I just received my Lenten Way of the Cross ✝️ today, the day before Ash Wednesday! incredible. I ordered late, but you mailed it immediately. Thank you!! It is wonderful and already displayed on my kitchen table ready to begin with the family tomorrow! As with everything I have ordered from you, it’s perfect, and it was so beautifully wrapped too! So much ❤️ went into it. Thank you and also, thanks for all your inspiration!

Jeanette is ready for Lent with her Way of the Cross…

And Theresa is ready, too!

Mother and Son Aprons! Feminine and Beautiful!

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Lenten Flip Cards available here.

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Lenten Printable Journal Available here.

 

 

Lenten Journal Available here.

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