Sunday, October 15, 20223
Phoenix
Sunday, October 15, 2023
2:00 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.
Phoenix Convention Center
South Building, Halls F & G, 33 S 3rd St., Phoenix AZ 85004
Doors open at noon for confession, adoration, exhibits
Questions? Call John at (602) 568-7047.
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Twentieth (20) Sunday after Pentecost
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
Ester, Chapter 8, Verse 17
So,
Ester saves the Jews and now it is cool to be a Jew. So cool that in Persia
there were Jewish posers. Interesting. Here we see God’s promise to those who
trust that after the trial, will come rejoicing; just as after the darkness of
night the sun does rise.
Brief
Lesson[1]
There
is no better consolation under crosses and afflictions than the thought that
all the troubles of this world are not to be compared with the glory to come,
and that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation worketh for
us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory (n. Cor. iv. 17). And,
therefore, St. Bede says: If we had to bear for a while the pains of hell, it
would not appear so hard, if thereby we might merit to see Christ in His glory,
and to be added to His saints.
Trusting
in God[2]
Life is filled with many
difficulties and challenges that cause us to worry. Each day we are confronted
with many events that may cause us to become apprehensive. What is
worry? The dictionary says that when we worry, we torment ourselves with
disturbing thoughts. According to the National Institutes of Health, one
in three adults has occasional insomnia, and one in ten adults has chronic
sleeplessness. Experts are concerned about the ever-increasing
consumption of sleeping pills by many Americans. The remedy for worry is
for all of us to trust in God. St. Augustine once said that God is closer
to us than we are to ourselves. We experience God through our life of
prayer. Prayer is conversation with God. Prayer is a continual being in
love because God is real. God is personal. No matter what
might be going on in our lives, we must
always pray and pray daily. Prayer is the air that we breathe. One
of the greatest challenges that we encounter is our inability to see and to
listen to God. We can be caught up in the distractions of daily life that
prevent us from really encountering God. Our busy lives require refreshing
times of prayer throughout the day. God is moving us away from clinging to
things, people and institutions. He is calling us to detachment, to the
desert, to the journey into the night of naked faith. He is calling us to
cling to him and only him. This journey is difficult, frightening at
times and even risky. But, those who embark upon the journey will be
transformed into living witnesses of the God of love. However, without a
serious spiritual life, anxiety and fear will overwhelm us. If we are a people
who live truly spiritual lives, we will be filled with peace and joy no matter
what may be going on around us. And this is so, because we will always be able
to trust God.
St. Teresa of Avila,
the famous Spanish mystic, once wrote: "Let nothing trouble you. Let nothing frighten you.
Everything passes. God never changes. Patience obtains all.
Whoever has God, wants for nothing. God alone is enough."
St. Teresa provides us
profound words of wisdom for our present times. The staggering number of
prescription drugs available for the many forms of uneasiness and tension
illustrates that many of our contemporaries suffer deep inner turmoil. It
is true that we are experiencing profound challenges: wars, continual threats
of terrorism, problems within our Catholic Church, the rapidly accelerating
unraveling of moral decency in our society, an uncertain economy and the
terrible wounds caused by the dismantling of family life. Nevertheless,
challenges such as these should remind us that we must always trust in God who is always with us. Trust is rooted in
faith which is a gift. If your faith is weak, ask God to give you more
faith. To do this incorporate into your lives four practices that are so
basic for anyone who wants to be a serious Catholic: contemplative prayer,
daily Mass or a prolonged visit before the Blessed Sacrament, daily Rosary and
the frequent use of the Sacrament of Confession. These four things will
allow you to trust God and they will provide you with the interior peace that
all seek.
What are the practical
steps that we can take in order to incorporate into our busy lives a serious
spiritual life?
·
First
of all, we need balance in our lives. When was the last time that we
enjoyed dinner with family and friends, or turned off our cell phone and
refrained from checking our email at every moment? Excessive work and travel,
excessive involvement in sports and entertainment are tearing us apart.
·
Secondly,
a serious spiritual life requires the capacity to be alone. It is difficult to be alone
in our contemporary society. Even when we are alone, the noise of our own
worries and fears drown out the silence of God's voice. Many people are
incapable of being alone and they immediately feel an obsession to talk with
someone on a cell phone or check their email. We all need moments of
solitude. Spending a quiet time before the Eucharist, reading the
Scriptures during a peaceful moment at home, taking tranquil walks through the
woods or along the beach all are necessary for our soul. In order to be
with God, we must develop the ability to be alone with ourselves.
· Thirdly, we need order in our lives. Working out daily schedules for the entire family by setting realistic priorities and minimizing extra-curricular activities for the children are steps that we can take. Early to bed and early to rise is a wise principle which is still valid today.
ON KEEPING THE LORD'S DAY HOLY[3]
My esteemed Brothers in the
Episcopate
and the Priesthood,
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
Introduction
7. The duty to
keep Sunday holy, especially by sharing in the Eucharist and by relaxing in a
spirit of Christian joy and fraternity, is easily understood if we consider the
many different aspects of this day upon which the present Letter will focus our
attention.
Sunday is a day
which is at the very heart of the Christian life. From the beginning of my
Pontificate, I have not ceased to repeat: "Do not be afraid! Open, open
wide the doors to Christ!". In the same way, today I would strongly urge
everyone to rediscover Sunday: Do not be afraid to give your time to Christ!
Yes, let us open our time to Christ, that he may cast light upon it and give it
direction. He is the One who knows the secret of time and the secret of
eternity, and he gives us "his day" as an ever-new gift of his love.
The rediscovery of this day is a grace which we must implore, not only so that
we may live the demands of faith to the full, but also so that we may respond
concretely to the deepest human yearnings. Time given to Christ is never time
lost, but is rather time gained, so that our relationships and indeed our whole
life may become more profoundly human.
Twentieth (20) Sunday after Pentecost[4]
The final manifestation of Christ...the
Church focuses on making our hearts ready through faith as we "redeem the
times".
THE Introit of the Mass is a humble prayer by which we confess
that we are punished for our disobedience. “All that Thou hast done to us, O
Lord, Thou hast done in true judgment, because we have sinned against Thee, and
we have not obeyed Thy commandments; but give glory to Thy name, and deal with
us according to the multitude of Thy mercy (Dan. iii.). “Blessed are the
undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.”
Prayer.
Be appeased, O Lord, we beseech Thee, and grant to Thy faithful
pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their offences, and serve
Thee with secure mind.
EPISTLE. Eph. v. 15-21.
See, brethren, how you walk circumspectly: not as unwise, but as
wise: redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore become not
unwise but understanding what is the will of God. And be not drunk with wine,
wherein is luxury, but be ye filled with the Holy Spirit. Speaking to
yourselves in psalms and hymns, and spiritual canticles, singing and making
melody in your hearts to the Lord: giving thanks always for all things in the
name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to God and the Father: being subject one to
another in the fear of Christ.
GOSPEL. John vi. 46-53
At that time there was a certain ruler whose son was sick at
Capharnaum. He having heard that Jesus was - come from Judea into Galilee, went
to Him, and prayed Him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point
of death. Jesus therefore said to him: Unless you see signs and wonders, you
believe not. The ruler saith to him: Lord, come down before that my son dies.
Jesus saith to him: Go thy way, thy son liveth. The man believed the word which
Jesus said to him and went his way. And as he was going down, his servants met
him: and they brought word, saying that his son lived. He asked therefore of
them the hour wherein he grew better. And they said to him: Yesterday at the
seventh hour the fever left him. The father therefore knew that it was at the same
hour that Jesus said to him, thy son liveth; and himself believed, and his
whole house.
Consolation in Sickness
To console ourselves in sickness, let us bethink ourselves that
God has sent us sickness for the good of our souls; that we may thereby attain
a knowledge of our sins, and make satisfaction for them; or, if we suffer
innocently, we may exercise ourselves in patience, charity, humility, and such
like virtues, and so increase our merits. When ill let us employ a competent
physician and use the remedies he may prescribe. But before all else, let us
betake ourselves to God, give ourselves up unreservedly to His will, pray Him
to enlighten the physician, and bless the means employed for our recovery, and
subdue our inclinations if the prescription of the physician does violence to
our former habits. For how otherwise should medicine have its proper effect?
O Lord, here burn, here wound, only spare
me in eternity!
St. Augustine
ON THE CARE OF THE SICK
All who have charge of the sick should before all think of the
soul, and to that end call upon Jesus to come in the Blessed Sacrament, before
the sick person is past the point of receiving Him with devotion. Therefore,
parents, children, relatives, and friends, if they truly love the sick, should
seek to induce him to receive the Blessed Sacrament in time. At the beginning,
and during the progress of the sickness, we should endeavor to encourage the
patient to resignation and childlike confidence in God; should place before him
the Savior, suffering and glorified, as a pattern and consolation, should pray
with him, to strengthen him against desponding thoughts and the temptations of
the devil; should sign him with the sign of the cross, sprinkle him with holy
water, and, before all, pray for a happy death. But in caring for the soul the
body is not to be neglected. We must call in time a skillful physician, give
the sick person his medicines at the appointed times, keep everything clean,
observe particularly the prescribed limit as to eating and drinking, and not
permit the patient to have his own will, for he might often desire what would
be hurtful to him. In general, we should do what, in like case, we would wish
to have done for ourselves, for there is no greater work of charity than to
attend a sick person, and particularly to assist him to a happy death.
Saint Teresa of Avila
Teresa, whose name was Teresa de
Cepeda y Ahumada, was born in Avila, Spain, in 1515. In her autobiography she
mentions some details of her childhood: she was born into a large family, her
“father and mother, who were devout and feared God”. She had three sisters and
nine brothers. While she was still a child and not yet nine years old she had
the opportunity to read the lives of several Martyrs which inspired in her such
a longing for martyrdom that she briefly ran away from home in order to die a
Martyr’s death and to go to Heaven (cf. Vida,[Life], 1,
4); “I want to see God”, the little girl told her parents.
A few years later Teresa was to speak
of her childhood reading and to state that she had discovered in it the way of
truth which she sums up in two fundamental principles.
On the one hand was the fact that (1)
“all things of this world will pass away” while on the other God alone is (2) “for
ever, ever, ever”, a topic that recurs in her best-known poem: “Let nothing
disturb you, let nothing frighten you, All things are passing away: God never
changes.
·
Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God
lacks nothing, God alone suffices”. She was about 12 years old when her mother
died, and she implored the Virgin Most Holy to be her mother (cf. Vida,
I, 7).
·
When she was 20, she entered the Carmelite
Monastery of the Incarnation, also in Avila. In her religious life she took the
name “Teresa of Jesus”. Three years later she fell seriously ill, so ill that
she remained in a coma for four days, looking as if she were dead (cf. Vida,
5, 9).
·
In the fight against her own illnesses too the
Saint saw the combat against weaknesses and the resistance to God’s call: “I
wished to live”, she wrote, “but I saw clearly that I was not living, but
rather wrestling with the shadow of death; there was no one to give me life,
and I was not able to take it. He who could have given it to me had good
reasons for not coming to my aid, seeing that he had brought me back to himself
so many times, and I as often had left him” (Vida, 7, 8).
·
In 1543 she lost the closeness of her relatives;
her father died and all her siblings, one after another, emigrated to America.
In Lent 1554, when she was 39 years old, Teresa reached the climax of her
struggle against her own weaknesses. The fortuitous discovery of the statue of
“a Christ most grievously wounded”, left a deep mark on her life (cf. Vida,
9).
·
The Saint, who in that period felt deeply in
tune with the St Augustine of the Confessions, thus describes the
decisive day of her mystical experience: “and... a feeling of the presence of
God would come over me unexpectedly, so that I could in no wise doubt either
that he was within me, or that I was wholly absorbed in him” (Vida, 10,
1).
Teresa of Jesus had no academic
education but always set great store by the teachings of theologians, men of
letters and spiritual teachers. As a writer, she always adhered to what she had
lived personally through or had seen in the experience of others (cf.
Prologue to The Way of Perfection), in other words basing herself on
her own first-hand knowledge.
Among her most important works we
should mention first of all her autobiography, El libro de la vida (the
book of life), which she called Libro de las misericordias del Señor
[book of the Lord’s mercies].
Among the most precious passages is
her commentary on the Our Father, as a model for prayer. St Teresa’s
most famous mystical work is El Castillo interior [The Interior Castle].
She wrote it in 1577 when she was in her prime. It is a reinterpretation of her
own spiritual journey and, at the same time, a codification of the possible
development of Christian life towards its fullness, holiness, under the action
of the Holy Spirit. Teresa refers to the structure of a castle with seven rooms
as an image of human interiority. She simultaneously introduces the symbol of
the silkworm reborn as a butterfly, in order to express the passage from the
natural to the supernatural. The Saint draws inspiration from Sacred Scripture,
particularly the Song of Songs, for the final symbol of the “Bride and
Bridegroom” which enables her to describe, in the seventh room, the four
crowning aspects of Christian life: the Trinitarian, the Christological, the
anthropological and the ecclesial.
Prayer is life and develops gradually,
in pace with the growth of Christian life: it begins with vocal prayer, passes
through interiorization by means of meditation and recollection, until it
attains the union of love with Christ and with the Holy Trinity. Obviously, in
the development of prayer climbing to the highest steps does not mean
abandoning the previous type of prayer. Rather, it is a gradual deepening of the
relationship with God that envelops the whole of life.
Another subject dear to the Saint is
the centrality of Christ’s humanity. For Teresa, in fact, Christian life is the
personal relationship with Jesus that culminates in union with him through
grace, love and imitation. Hence the importance she attaches to meditation on
the Passion and on the Eucharist as the presence of Christ in the Church for
the life of every believer, and as the heart of the Liturgy. St Teresa lives
out unconditional love for the Church: she shows a lively “sensus
Ecclesiae”, in the face of the episodes of division and conflict in the
Church of her time.
A final essential aspect of Teresian
doctrine which I would like to emphasize is perfection, as the aspiration of
the whole of Christian life and as its ultimate goal. The Saint has a very
clear idea of the “fullness” of Christ, relived by the Christian. At the end of
the route through The Interior Castle, in the last “room”, Teresa
describes this fullness, achieved in the indwelling of the Trinity, in union
with Christ through the mystery of his humanity.
Dear brothers and sisters, St Teresa
of Jesus is a true teacher of Christian life for the faithful of every time. In
our society, which all too often lacks spiritual values, St Teresa teaches us
to be unflagging witnesses of God, of his presence and of his action. She
teaches us truly to feel this thirst for God that exists in the depths of our
hearts, this desire to see God, to seek God, to be in conversation with him and
to be his friends. This is the friendship we all need that we must seek anew,
day after day. May the example of this Saint, profoundly contemplative and
effectively active, spur us too every day to dedicate the right time to prayer,
to this openness to God, to this journey, in order to seek God, to see him, to
discover his friendship and so to find true life; indeed many of us should truly say: “I am not
alive, I am not truly alive because I do not live the essence of my
life”. Therefore, time devoted to prayer is not time wasted, it is time in
which the path of life unfolds, the path unfolds to learning from God an ardent
love for him, for his Church, and practical charity for our brothers and
sisters.
Catechism of the Catholic
Church
PART TWO: THE CELEBRATION OF THE CHRISTIAN
MYSTERY
SECTION TWO-THE SEVEN
SACRAMENTS OF THE CHURCH
CHAPTER TWO-THE SACRAMENTS OF HEALING
Article 4-THE SACRAMENT OF PENANCE AND RECONCILIATION
I. What is This Sacrament Called?
1423 It is called the sacrament of
conversion because it makes sacramentally present Jesus' call to conversion,
the first step in returning to the Father5 from whom one has strayed by sin.
It is called the sacrament of Penance, since it consecrates the Christian
sinner's personal and ecclesial steps of conversion, penance, and satisfaction.
1424 It is called the sacrament of
confession, since the disclosure or confession of sins to a priest is an
essential element of this sacrament. In a profound sense it is also a
"confession" - acknowledgment and praise - of the holiness of God and
of his mercy toward sinful man.
It is called the sacrament of forgiveness, since by the priest's sacramental
absolution God grants the penitent "pardon and peace."
It is called the sacrament of Reconciliation, because it imparts to the sinner
the love of God who reconciles: "Be reconciled to God."7 He who lives by God's merciful love is ready to respond to the Lord's
call: "Go; first be reconciled to your brother."
Daily Devotions
·
Today in honor of the
Holy Trinity do the Divine Office giving your day to God. To honor God REST: no
shopping after 6 pm Saturday till Monday. Don’t forget the internet.
·
Unite in the work of the Porters of St. Joseph by joining them
in fasting: Today's Fast: Families of St. Joseph’s Porters
·
Religion
in the Home for Preschool: October
·
Litany of the Most Precious
Blood of Jesus
·
Offering to
the sacred heart of Jesus
·
Rosary
[4]Goffine’s Devout Instructions, 1896
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