Category Archives: Religion

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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Divine Office, Divine!

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For all  you, who pray the Divine Office  daily or are struggling in an attempt, you’ve got to check out DivineOffice.org.   They do an incredible job of presenting the Divine Office (Invitatory, Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer)  with beautiful music and a community of voices. I love the sense of community!

Your “Cloud of Witnesses” will have help cheering you on from this side of Heaven.  It’s a great way to begin the day and so blessed a way to end it.  Commuters, you’ll actually find this time beating back the devil.

Did I tell you it is FREE!

The really good news is you can download the podcasts and take them with you (FREE!!!!!!!!)

No Mention-Pelosi

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Gateway Pundit calls it a rebuke , while Speaker Pelosi avoids the obvious in her release:

“It is with great joy that my husband, Paul, and I met with his Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI today,” Pelosi said in a statement released hours after the meeting. “In our conversation, I had the opportunity to praise the Church’s leadership in fighting poverty, hunger and global warming, as well as the Holy Father’s dedication to religious freedom and his upcoming trip and message to Israel. I was proud to show his Holiness a photograph of my family’s papal visit in the 1950s, as well as a recent picture of our children and grandchildren.”

Victor L. Simpson,  AP writer, reports:

The Vatican’s attempts to keep the Pelosi visit low-profile displayed its obvious unease with the new U.S. administration. Benedict and Bush had found common ground in opposing abortion, an issue that drew them together despite their differences over the war in Iraq.

Wednesday’s meeting, in a small room off a Vatican auditorium after the pope’s weekly public audience, was closed to reporters and photographers.

The Vatican also said — contrary to its usual policy when the pope meets world leaders — that it was not issuing either a photo or video of the encounter, claiming the meeting was private.

The Anchoress writes:  Pope Punks Pelosi Pix

A Fly on the Vatican Wall

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Oh, to have been the proverbial fly on the wall when Pope Benedict XVI met privately with Madam Speaker Pelosi.  Actually,  if I were the fly, I’d have perched myself on Nancy’s nose as she posed Speakerential.  The Pope is cool, kind, and slendorously Poperific so he’ll continue fighting for her soul while she’s stuck in radical wrong-headed feminism.

From Whispers in the Loggia, the Vatican statement:

Following the General Audience the Holy Father briefly greeted Mrs Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, together with her entourage.

His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the Church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of its development.

You Are My Hiding Place

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The Anchoress reminded me of a verse from the Evening Prayer of the Divine Office for Thursday Week I.

So let every good man pray to You

in the time of need.

The floods of water may reach high

they shall not reach him.

You are my hiding place, O Lord;

you save me from distress.

You surround me with cries of deliverance.   (Psalm 32: 6-7)

When I read the words, “You are my hiding place,” Corrie ten Boom’s story,”The Hiding Place” came to mind.  I was also reading Immaculee Ilibagiza’s book, “Left To Tell, Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.”  Both Corrie’s story and Immaculee’s book leave vivid images of the faithfulness of God not only in the mind, but in the heart, .  Neither tells the story of the proverbial rose garden that we all want.  Corrie and Immaculee lose the people they love.  Their homelands become unrecognizable.

Corrie introduces us to her sister,  Betsie, who dies in the concentration camp.  What I loved about Betsie was how she made a home in the midst of  the horrific circumstances of the camp; cheery dish towels hung at the window.  Betsie’s actual home was the hiding place she made in the heart of God.  Betsie was prepared to die.

Immaculee’s book describes an actual hiding place, a bathroom that became a haven for her and seven other women for ninety-one days.  It was here they hid, and silently prayed, while hundreds of crazed, “machete-wielding” neighbors sought to butcher them.  Again, God proved to be the real hiding place.

The triumph of  their stories is told by the transformed hearts of these women of faith.  Their books are a witness to God’s faithfulness in times of desperation.

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.