Daily Miracles

Jesus performed miracles for those who suffered.  If You want daily miracles, empty yourself and ask for the 'Hand Of The Lord'.

 

There are all kinds of miracles. There are huge miracles -- healings, rescues. There are times when miracles are so awesome that folks simply don't believe it. Then there are the "little miracles" -- the miracles that are hard to describe, that come as a sequence, the kind you have to "be there" to appreciate.

 

Whichever you are about to receive (and God has a reservoir for every one of us), we open ourselves best for them when we pray, empty ourselves, work at eliminating all selfishness, and let God fill us.

Make room for God, and He will come -- on a daily basis!

You will feel the "Hand of the Lord."

The Hand of the Lord is the biblical term for God's power in the lives of His people (see Joshua 4:24 and Isaiah 59:1). 

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Personal Relationship

A personal relationship with God is essential.

 

“Look at me. ” In other words to be able to say, “This word, this teaching, is true, because in the laboratory of my own life, I have tested it, and found it to be true, and here’s how. And Jesus is real, because I have met him and here’s when, and here is how. And here is how I’m experiencing him today in my life. Yes, when I pray, I am heard. The Lord speaks in the depths of my heart, sometimes in wordless contemplation, at other times vividly through his proclaimed word, and in my mind, and in the experiences and interactions of my day. I see him, I know him, and I experience his presence, and this is changing my life.”

• Can you authentically speak like this?
• Have you met the Lord,?
• How, when?
• Do you know him?
• And how is your relationship with him changing your life?
• What has your walk with him done?
• Have you encountered him in his word, and in the sacraments celebrated?
• How, when, and what has this liturgical experience of the Lord done for you?
• How is it changing you?

These are essential questions and truths to ponder to be able to answer briefly and articulately if we are going to personally evangelize others today.

 

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Silence

Embrace silence during suffering.  Do not react to anger and resentment.

Pope Francis recently stated:

"Only silence guards the mystery of the journey that a person walks with God, said Pope Francis in his homily at Mass on Friday morning at the Casa Santa Marta. May the Lord, the Pope added, give us "the grace to love the silence”, which needs to be guarded from all publicity.

In the history of salvation, neither in the clamour nor in the blatant, but the shadows and the silence are the places in which God chose to reveal himself to humankind. The imperceptible reality from which his mystery, from time to time, took visible form, took flesh. The Pope’s reflections were inspired by the Annunciation, which was today’s Gospel reading, in particular the passage in which the angel tells Mary that the power of the Most High would "overshadow” her. The shadow, which has almost the same quality as the cloud, with which God protected the Jews in the desert, the Pope said.

"The Lord always took care of the mystery and hid the mystery. He did not publicize the mystery. A mystery that publicizes itself is not Christian; it is not the mystery of God: it is a fake mystery! And this is what happened to Our Lady, when she received her Son: the mystery of her virginal motherhood is hidden. It is hidden her whole life! And she knew it. This shadow of God in our lives helps us to discover our own mystery: the mystery of our encounter with the Lord, our mystery of our life’s journey with the Lord.”

"Each of us,” affirmed the Pope, "knows how mysteriously the Lord works in our hearts, in our souls.” And what is "the cloud, the power, the way the Holy Spirit covers our mystery?”

"This cloud in us, in our lives is called silence: the silence is exactly the cloud that covers the mystery of our relationship with the Lord, of our holiness and of our sins. This mystery that we cannot explain. But when there is no silence in our lives, the mystery is lost, it goes away. Guarding the mystery with silence! That is the cloud, that is the power of God for us, that is the strength of the Holy Spirit.”

The Mother of Jesus was the perfect icon of silence. From the proclamation of her exceptional maternity at Calvary. The Pope said he thinks about "how many times she remained quiet and how many times she did not say that which she felt in order to guard the mystery of her relationship with her Son,” up until the most raw silence "at the foot of the cross”.

"The Gospel does not tell us anything: if she spoke a word or not… She was silent, but in her heart, how many things told the Lord! ‘You, that day, this and the other that we read, you had told me that he would be great, you had told me that you would have given him the throne of David, his forefather, that he would have reigned forever and now I see him there!’ Our Lady was human! And perhaps she even had the desire to say: ‘Lies! I was deceived!’ John Paul II would say this, speaking about Our Lady in that moment. But she, with her silence, hid the mystery that she did not understand and with this silence allowed for this mystery to grow and blossom in hope.”

"Silence is that which guards the mystery,” for which the mystery "of our relationship with God, of our journey, of our salvation cannot be… publicized,” the Pope repeated. May the Lord give all of us the grace to love the silence, to seek him and to have a heart that is guarded by the cloud of silence.”

 

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Prepare for Christmas Through Silence

If silence is not one of the sounds associated with Christmas preparations, people might miss an experience of the love and tenderness that is at the heart of the holiday, Pope Francis has said.
Celebrating Mass yesterday in the chapel of his residence, Pope Francis offered a reflection on the tone of voice and the endearments God uses to speak to people and communicate his love.

It’s not so much what God says as how he says it, the Pope said in his homily.

“When a child has a bad dream and wakes up crying,” he said, “Dad goes and says, ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared. I’m here.’

“The Lord speaks this way, too,” he said, pointing to the day’s reading from Isaiah 41, in which the Lord reassures Jacob, affectionately calling him a little worm.

“When we watch a dad or mom talking to a child, we see how they become small, using the voice of a child and the gestures of a child,” he said. “From the outside one can think, ‘Oh, how ridiculous.’ They make themselves smaller, don’t they? That’s because a father’s or mother’s love needs to be close. I’d say this: They need to crouch down to enter the world of the child.”

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Mystics

The primary mission of the mystics is to be victim souls—that is, they are especially called by God to suffer in union with Jesus for the conversion of souls. It is a spiritual battle for souls between God and the demons, where the victim soul is essentially the “battle ground”, and the stakes is the conversion of many persons who are at that moment in the hands of the devil. 

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Tryanny of Intellect

To endure personal suffering we need a change of mind and heart, to think the way the Church thinks.  St. Paul refers to it as putting on the "mind of Christ".

Flannery O’Connor in her conversion to Catholicism spoke of the glorious freedom she experienced in being delivered from the “tyranny of her intellect.” Fides ut intelligam! That has become my experience. It is the paradox of true intellectual freedom by submission to “the church’s teaching.” It is a glorious freedom, not only in the mind’s love for God, but in the vocation of the priest in theological and spiritual formation of disciples of Jesus.

This theological conversion thus is not first of all a conversion to the peculiar Catholic beliefs that my inquirers challenge me about: What about Mary? What about purgatory? What about contraception? Rather it is a conversion to the faithfulness of Christ’s gift to the Church of an authentic authority to bind and to loose. At its deepest it is a question of pneumatology even more than ecclesiology—how does the Spirit of Truth actually function in the Church? Whatever complexities and seeming incongruities may be discerned, the Magisterium is (at minimum) a reasonable and practicable answer to the question of Truth that is trustworthy; at best, it is what the Church proclaims it to be: the provision by Christ of the gift of unerring guidance to his people.

Celibacy

Priests are called to be celibate (like Christ) to help carry burdens for those who suffer.

To our sex-obsessed culture, priestly celibacy seems a hard teaching of the Church, a heavy burden that must be borne with ascetic grit and iron resolve.

Priests as Christ figures. Above all else, the Catholic priest is an alter Christus—“another Christ.” This is clearest in the sacrifice of the Mass, when the priest acts in the person of the Christ in offering the Eucharist. Celibacy configures priests more completely to Christ, who lived a perfectly chaste life. Thus they not only “participate in His priestly office” but also share “His very condition of living,” Pope Paul VI writes in the encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus.

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Why does God let us suffer?

Jesus didn't suffer so we wouldn't have to. Jesus suffered so we'd know how to. So even when you're in the darkest moments of life, when you just want to cry out to God, do you know where He is? He's on the Cross right next to you, saying...

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Catechism

Bible Stories are essential if we want to communicate the culture and world of the Bible to our children and help them make sense of our glorious faith.

The back to basics approach is broken into three main sections, based on the words of an old hymn:

I once was lost in sin, but Jesus took me in, and then a little light from heaven filled my soul!

 

Part 1 (Sept to January) – SIN - I once was lost in sin – Here we start with the story of Original Sin and read the early chapter that show how God made all things to be very good, But in Original Sin and all the other sins committed and described in the early chapters of Genesis, both creation and man were devastated. Sin and our conniving with the devil is responsible most of the suffering in the world. Through Bible stories and about forty pages of the “My Catholic Faith” catechism we learn of sin’s devastating effects We distinguish Original Sin, Actual sin, mortal and venial sin, the seven deadly sins and so forth. In so doing we paint of picture of how we were lost in Sin.

Part 2 (From Pre-Lent through early Easter) – Redemption - but Jesus took me in. Having welcomed Jesus as savior of the world at Christmas we now look to the paschal mystery wherein Jesus undertakes to save us from our wretched condition. Here too we read Bible stories and connect to the elements of Jesus ministry to heal us, drive out demons and ultimately to take the hill of Calvary engage Satan in battle, suffer die, rise and ascend for us. The goal here is gratitude more than information. We strive to “remember,” that is, to have so present in our mind and heart what Jesus has done for us so that we are grateful and different.

Part 3  – (Early Easter through Pentecost). – Grace- And then a little light from heaven filled my soul! In saving us, Jesus gives us a new mind and heart, a whole new life. The graces of the Christian life are explored: Faith, Hope, Charity, patience, joy, chastity, forgiveness, mercy, and so many other virtues and gifts. We reflect on the whole new Life Jesus has given us and encourage testimony about the transformation brought about by God’s grace working through Scripture, Sacraments, fellowship and prayer. If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation.

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Stages of Sin

One cannot commit a mortal sin by accident.  You have to work at it.  We often fall under the deception of the devil subconsciously.  It is important to be aware and stay focused. 

There are just times when a saint speaks and one is stunned by the insight, the piercing analysis, like a surgeon’s scalpel dividing diseased from healthy tissue. Such is the case with a quote I read recently from St. Bernard that Ralph Martin references in his Book “The Fulfillment of all desires.”

In this quote Bernard analyzes the descent into the increasing darkness of sin experienced by those who do not turn back, who refuse to hear the call to repent. And not individuals only, but, I would argue, cultures too.

 

St. Bernard’s quote is long enough that I can only make brief comments. But consider it first in toto, and then in stages. Here is the full quote:

 

If this cold once penetrates the soul when (as so often happens) the soul is neglectful and the spirit asleep and if no one (God forbid) is there to curb it, then it reaches into the soul’s interior, descends to the depths of the heart and the recesses of the mind, paralyzes the affections, obstructs the paths of counsel, unsteadies the light of judgment, fetters the liberty of the spirit, and soon – as appears to bodies sick with fever – a rigor of the mind takes over: vigor slackens, energies grow languid, repugnance for austerity increases, fear of poverty disquiets, the soul shrivels, grace is withdrawn, time means boredom, reason is lulled to sleep, the spirit is quenched, the fresh fervor wanes away, a fastidious lukewarmness weighs down, brotherly love grows cold, pleasure attracts, security is a trap, old habits return. Can I say more? The law is cheated, justice is rejected, what is right is outlawed, the fear of the Lord is abandoned. Shamelessness finally gets free rein. There comes that rash leap, so dishonorable, so disgraceful, so full of ignominy and confusion; a leap from the heights into the abyss, from the court-yard to the dung-heap, from the throne to the sewer, from heaven to the mud, from the cloister to the world, from paradise to hell. (sermon 63.6b on the Song of Songs, The Fox in the Vineyard).

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