Category Archives: Mary

Making the Connection – My Rosary, My Weapon

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The Anchoress had an encounter with Mystery.  Seems the little children of Fatima, Jacinta and Francisco,  now beatified by John Paul II, want to get the word out;  the Rosary is our weapon!

Indeed, it is!  If you remember, the apparitions at Fatima occurred immediately before the Bolshevik Revolution.  Russia had little world power.  No one saw it as a menace when the Blessed Virgin Mary gave us her prophetic message,  that WW I would soon end but a far worse war would follow if our Lady’s warning was not heeded and Russia consecrated to her Immaculate Heart:

You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.

The whole world is still at risk and in error.  Those who faced down the enemies of Faith have clung to their rosaries.  In Ukraine, blood and beads battled for the soul of that country. The Ukrainian Bishop of Lutsk, Markijam Trofimiak, wrote: A Monument to Heroism in Ukraine. He recounts:

Once at a symposium, I was asked: “Should it ever be decided to erect a monument in the Ukraine  to the person who has made the greatest contribution to safeguarding the faith in this land, to whom would it be justly dedicated?”. I pondered awhile before answering. In a flash, the faces of well-known priests who survived the concentration camps, Soviet prisons and years of physical and moral terror passed before my eyes. The witness to faith of these priests surpasses what we are accustomed to call “heroism”. Although remembering their undeniable merits, I answered: “The monument would have to be dedicated to an elderly woman with the Rosary in her hands“.


LENT for the Soul

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Message From Pope Benedict XVI for LENT 2009

“He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry” (Mt 4,1-2)

“The practice of fasting is very present in the first Christian community. The Church Fathers, too, speak of the force of fasting to bridle sin, especially the lusts of the “old Adam,” and open in the heart of the believer a path to God. Moreover, fasting is a practice that is encountered frequently and recommended by the saints of every age. Saint Peter Chrysologus writes: “Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. So if you pray, fast; if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. If you do not close your ear to others, you open God’s ear to yourself.”

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Dear brothers and sisters, it is good to see how the ultimate goal of fasting is to help each one of us, as the Servant of God Pope John Paul II wrote, to make the complete gift of self to God (Encyclical Veritatis splendor.)  May every family and Christian community use well this time of Lent, therefore, in order to cast aside all that distracts the spirit and grow in whatever nourishes the soul, moving it to love of God and neighbor. I am thinking especially of a greater commitment to prayer, lectio divina, recourse to the Sacrament of Reconciliation and active participation in the Eucharist, especially the Holy Sunday Mass. With this interior disposition, let us enter the penitential spirit of Lent. May the Blessed Virgin Mary, Causa nostrae laetitiae (Cause of our joy,) accompany and support us in the effort to free our heart from slavery to sin, making it evermore a “living tabernacle of God.”

Searching with Mary

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Paraphrased from The Holy Rosary Narrated, distributed by Keepthefaith.org and narrated by Fr. Hugh Thwaites:

A reflection on the Fifth Joyful Mystery – The Finding of Jesus in the Temple

“The whole human race are either Mary’s children or potentially her children because when we’re baptized,  we are baptized into Jesus and become her children.  For the rest,  her motherly heart searches,  and cannot rest until she sees her children safe in Heaven.”

If you look closely at an icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, you will notice the small sandal hanging from the foot of the Infant Jesus, who is safe in His Mother’s arms.  This represents those who Mary also holds if only by a thread.

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Remembering Michael

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Amy Welborn shares not only her grief but her gratitude for all that is Michael.  Amy writes:

“How can I, even as I acknowledge the crushing, puzzling, confusing loss and my shattered heart  – for even Jesus wept –  how can I say that I love him and that I believe all this stuff we both said we believed is actually true – and not allow some gratitude, albeit limited and struggling gratitude – to creep into my soul, for that thing, which is not a small thing, but a great thing?”

It will be a good day to die when someone who knows me intimately can write:

He prayed the Office almost every day of the last 25 years or so. Prayed the rosary every day for longer. Went to Mass almost every day.

He prayed, and knew intimately all those words I have been praying – or trying to pray – so intensely over the past week.

Thirsting for God. Rescuing from the snares of the enemy. Letting Christ live in me, being consumed, taken over by Christ, the Risen One,  alive in Him. Praying for that. Every day. Asking God for mercy, for forgiveness, for peace. For the total embrace of Love.

Living in the Womb

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I should be in bed.  It’s too early for this, but if I don’t share it, I won’t be able to get back to bed as I still imagine I will do.  I was listening to a rosary reflection on the Visitation.  Here in essence is what was said:

Our Lady, now expecting,  goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth.  We can be sure that during the journey and the months she was caring for Elizabeth, Mary never forgot the baby growing within her.  Jesus, being fashioned, in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit; that’s an image of what happens to us in our life of grace. That intimate fashioning is what my whole life as a christian is to be.

When we are in the state of grace, we have the Holy Trinity living in us.  We, however, can be so caught up in daily life and its demands,  that we don’t think of that at all.  If we did, we’d be aware of the movements of grace within, and so be motivated more by grace than by nature.  Jesus being fashioned by God in the womb of His Mother Mary; to be in touch with this mystery is not to leave Jesus alone, as it were, but to be with Him as Mary was.  The reality of our life of grace is that,  like Jesus, we are very dependent on Mary.  It is our Father’s plan: to be fashioned by God in intimate dependence on Mary into a perfect likeness of Jesus.  This is the essence of our whole life of  in the Spirit.  Our entire life is now wrapped up in loving God.  In Mary,  for the first time, God is adequately loved by a creature.

Irked by the Mother of God?

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It amazes me that the Mother of Jesus has come to be such a contentious figure.  Some time ago, I painted Our Lady with the Child Jesus in her arms.  It showed at the Parker Gallery in CO.   A church met in the same building, so members of the congregation would stop by to see the artwork after services.  One Sunday only a young girl, about 9 years old, wondered  from painting to painting,  until she came to Mother and Child.  She stood before it a moment considering the painting and then to my astonishment made a disdainful sound, “Psst!” motherchild12 Then,  the child tossed her head and left abruptly.  The gesture seemed beyond her years.  Wouldn’t you expect an image of a mother and a child to touch a soft spot in a young and tender heart? Instead,  it struck like a rock bouncing off unyielding ground.   I remembered the lyrics of a song from South Pacific:

You’ve to to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

Prejudice can effect, or more accurately,  infect us at any age or stage.  It’s sad when it blinds us to goodness; saddest when it makes us immune to holiness, which, I guess,  it always does.