Monday, February 26, 2024
Monday Night at the Movies
Monday Second Week in Lent
GRAND CANYON Established 1919
Ester, Chapter 4D, Verse 5
She glowed with perfect beauty and
her face was as joyous as it was lovely, though her heart was pounding with FEAR.
Ester
after making a total and complete commitment to save the people and fasting for
3 days approached her husband the King. She was at peace. This verse reflects
the joy of the woman in Mark’s chapter 5 whom Christ healed:
There
was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years.
26She had
suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had.
Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. 27She
had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his
cloak. 28 She said, “If I but touch his
clothes, I shall be cured.” 29Immediately her
flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her
affliction. 30Jesus, aware at once that power
had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched
my clothes?” 31But his disciples said to him,
“You see how the crowd is pressing upon you, and yet you ask, ‘Who touched
me?’” 32And he looked around to see who had
done it. 33The woman, realizing what had
happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus
and told him the whole truth. 34He said to
her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your
affliction.
An
unclean person in general had to avoid that which was holy and take steps to
return to a state of cleanliness. Uncleanliness placed a person in a
"dangerous" condition under threat of divine retribution, even death,
if the person approached the sanctuary. Uncleanness could lead to expulsion of
the land's inhabitants and its peril lingered upon those who did not undergo
purification. Bodily discharges (blood for women, semen for men) represented a
temporary loss of strength and life and movement toward death. Because decaying
corpses discharged, so natural bodily discharges were reminders of sin and
death. Physical imperfections representing a movement from "life"
toward "death" moved a person ritually away from God who was
associated with life. Purification rituals symbolized movement from death
toward life and accordingly involved blood, the color red, and spring (lit.
"living") water, all symbols of life.[1]
Christ also being clean took this woman’s uncleanliness and gave her his
Holiness. Indeed, she was filled with wonder and awe.
For you know the gracious act of
our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor,
so that by his poverty you might become rich. (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Christ did the same for the two princes of His church and He will do the same for you. Be clean!
Monday Second Week in Lent[2]
Prayer. BE propitious, O Lord, to our
prayers, and heal the desires of our souls, that, having received forgiveness,
we may ever rejoice in Thy benediction.
EPISTLE, in. Kings
xvii. 8-16.
In
those days: The word of the Lord came to Elias, the Thesbite, saying: Arise,
and go to Sarephta a city of the idonians, and dwell there: for I have
commanded a widow woman there to feed thee. He arose and went to Sarephta. And
when he was come to the gate of the city, he saw the widow woman gathering
sticks, and he called her, and said to her: Give me a little water in a vessel,
that I may drink. And when she was going to fetch it, he called after her,
saying: Bring me also, I beseech thee, a morsel of bread in thy hand. And she
answered: As the Lord thy God liveth, I have no bread, but only a handful of
meal in a pot, and a little oil in a cruse: behold I am gathering two sticks
that I may go in and dress it, for me and my son, that we may eat it and die.
And Elias said to her: Fear not but go and do as thou hast said: but first make
for me of the same meal a little hearth-cake and bring it to me: and after make
for thyself and thy son. For thus saith the Lord the God of Israel: The pot of
meal shall not waste, nor the cruse of oil be diminished, until the day wherein
the Lord will give rain upon the face of the earth. She went and did according
to the word of Elias: and he ate, and she and her house: and from that day the
pot of meal wasted not, and the cruse of oil was not diminished, according to
the word of the Lord, which He spoke in the hand of Elias.
GOSPEL. Matt, xxiii.
1-12.
At that time
Jesus spoke to the multitudes and to His disciples, saying: The scribes and the
Pharisees have sitten on the chair of Moses. All things therefore whatsoever
they shall say to you, observe and do: but according to their works do ye not:
for they say, and do not. For they bind heavy and insupportable burdens and lay
them on men’s shoulders: but with a finger of their own they will not move
them. And all their works they do for to be seen of men. For they make their
phylacteries broad and enlarge their fringes. And they love the first places at
feasts, and the first chairs in the synagogues, and salutations in the
marketplace, and to be called by men, Rabbi. But be not you called Rabbi. For
One is your master, and all you are brethren. And call none your father upon
earth: for One is your father Who is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters:
for One is your master, Christ. He that is the greatest among you shall be your
servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled: and he that shall humble
himself shall be exalted.
Explanation. The law of God imposes certain
obligations on us. The priest and the teacher teach God’s Gospel in His name,
and we shall be judged if we refuse to believe God’s truth and, in His Church,
because our teachers may not practice what they preach.
The
greatest proof of Christ's charity was given on the Cross. With Christ our gift
of ourselves will be given to God as an expression of our love. Communion will
lift our human activities up to God's level, not only in will and intention,
but in the reality of the sacrament. Let us offer then, and believe, and change
our lives into more loving. —St. Andrew Bible Missal
What the
Grand Canyon tells us about God[3]
(est. today in 1919)
Many years ago, I was
telling my spiritual director that I found it easiest to pray in a beautiful
garden, and I was warming to my sense of myself as a contemplative. The wise
Dominican asked with disarming candor:
“But are you in the
garden, or is the garden in you?”
It
took a long time even to realize what the question meant. I remember another
similarly disarming question at the very beginning of my adult search for God.
I was an undergraduate and took myself to a Benedictine monastery for a few
days’ retreat in Lent. I was captivated by the silence, prayer and retreat from
the world, swept up in the chant and the romance of monastic life. What I did
not realize was that I was attracted to it as something that would make it less
painful to be what I thought I was – something I needed for my religious
amour-propre. Thus, many searches for God begin, but one can only search for
God because he has already found you. What must happen is that someone else
must put a belt around you and lead you where you would rather not go. It is
not the intensity of the search, but of the willingness to be led that is
ultimately the measure of vocation. Vocation is not finding the garden in you;
it is finding yourself in the garden.
Perhaps the wise abbot
sensed this. Anyway, I remember being rather discombobulated by his direct
manner. As I emoted about the spiritual life, he looked at me carefully and
asked:
“Is God real to you?”
It
was like a torpedo below the waterline of all my high-sounding talk about my
attraction to the monastic life versus secular priesthood, the script I was
busy constructing of an encounter with the living God in which I remained
firmly the star. The best answer I could manage was: “I think so.” In the
moment of asking I doubted it, or rather I realized suddenly that so much of
what I thought was God wasn’t actually God. It was the paraphernalia of God, of
religion. (In fact, the moment wasn’t too confounding, for soon there came
another answer from deep inside: “He’s real to me in the Blessed Sacrament.”
There – perhaps because, as Aquinas put it, “Sight, touch and taste in thee are
each deceived” – I couldn’t confuse feeling for the reality.
I realized that I had been
given something to work with.) All of this came to mind when I visited the
Grand Canyon at the end of my trip to America.
What’s the connection?
One
may grasp what one might call the paraphernalia of the Grand Canyon. It was
formed by billions of years of imperceptibly slow change, of almost every
possible kind of geological activity: sediment layering, tectonic plates
shifting, glaciers melting and rivers carving a gorge a mile and a half deep
into solid rock. These are processes that can be mapped and understood, but the
result overwhelms the sum and the mind of man. It’s astonishing, ancient beauty
can only be contemplated – that is, it must act on you, overwhelm your mind
with its four-billion-year-old scale, stillness and silence which is in
constant change.
Spontaneously, the words
of the psalmist rose from my heart at the breathtaking sight: “Before the
mountains or the hills were brought forth, you are God, without beginning or
end.” Contemplation always involves knowledge of one’s true scale, of a reality
that dwarfs the ego. As if this were not enough, as the sun set, the sky above
came alive with stars. I have never seen so many or so clearly. They were like
the lights of some vast celestial city calling, a million points of light and
security like some distant homeland, like the medieval fantasy that the stars
were rents in the sky through which one could see the light of heaven. To count
them I must be eternal, like God. The psalmist said:
“When I see the
heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars which you have made, what
is man, that thou art mindful of him?”
And
the answer comes back that in Jesus Christ the Father has united himself to the
heart of every person in such a way that the vastness of the universe becomes
an image not of alienation, but of the vastness of a love that was there before
the hills were set in order. This love causes even rocks to exude a soft beauty
which seems like the desire of the Eternal Hills for the Heart of their maker.
Catechism
of the Catholic Church
PART THREE: LIFE IN CHRIST
SECTION TWO-THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
CHAPTER
TWO-YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF
Jesus said
to his disciples: "Love one another even as I have loved you."
2196 In response to the
question about the first of the commandments, Jesus says: "The first is,
'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,
and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor
as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."
The apostle St. Paul reminds us of this: "He who loves his neighbor has
fulfilled the law. the commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery, You shall
not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,' and any other commandment,
are summed up in this sentence, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the
law."
Coffee with Christ
Christ sips his coffee and looks at me and says, “I ascended to the Father to prepare a place for you and to send the Holy Spirit to prepare you for heaven. Trust in me; I did not leave you orphans. I am with you in the eucharist. No need to seek elsewhere; so, come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Do not emulate the hopelessness of the modernists who forsake their own belief, do not grieve like the rest who have no courage. Be not afraid.”
Daily Devotions
·
Unite in the work of the Porters of St. Joseph by joining them in
fasting: Today's Fast: Growth
of Catholic Families and Households
·
Eat waffles and Pray for the assistance of the Angels
·
Litany of the Most Precious
Blood of Jesus
·
Offering to
the sacred heart of Jesus
·
Monday: Litany of
Humility
[2] Goffine’s Devout Instructions, 1896
[3]http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/february-27th-2015/what-the-grand-canyon-tells-us-about-god/
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