🧀The Cheese & Crackers = Quotes by 🥗Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, Major Ian Thomas, and A Benedictine Oblate
🍆The Veggies = My 2💰
🍟The Potatoes = Article: "After 33 years, 3 a.m. adoration is still a weekly practice" , by Katherine Burgess
🌭The Meat = "IT IS IN GIVING THAT WE RECEIVE",– PART 3 MINI-COURSE ON PRAYER, by David Torkington
🍧The Dessert = YouTube video: "Flame of Love, Three Obstacles”, Seminar 2, by Rev. James Otto
🌰 “Why do we keep failing even in our best efforts to live the Christian life? Because no one other than Jesus Christ can live it, for the simple reason that He is the Christian life! And only He can live it in our lives as well. The more you become genuinely and relentlessly available to Christ, the more He can take over so that your Christian walk becomes vibrant and effective. This inspiring devotional, along with the application questions at the end of each reading, will help you focus consistently on Jesus Himself so you can serve and enjoy Him at an entirely new level and dimension. So whom do you want dwelling in you? More of you? Or all of Christ? By Major Ian Thomas
🍔 "“In spite of our smallness, our weakness, and our unworthiness, He seeks us as His own, and grants us His precious and very great promises, that we may escape from the corruption that is in the world, and become partakers of His divine nature". By A Benedictine Oblate
👊🏼 A strange year like never before seen
👊🏼God said it's time to practice.
👊🏼In the spiritual life one must learn to move beyond the hit &miss
👊🏼The key is an open heart and not putting up a fuss
👊🏼 Because amply provided is every thing needed to each and every one of us
👊🏼We will have not one, but any necessary spiritual tool
👊🏼Then comes a time to demonstrate what we've been learning in class while daily attending spiritual school
👊🏼Fed with the best of theory, now boots on the ground
👊🏼It's to keep the focus that day by day we're heavenly bound
👊🏼 The main lesson is accepting what God will permit & willing moment by moment what He chooses to will
👊🏼This is accomplished by letting go, and letting God be God, being ever so spiritually still
👊🏼Being patient, seeing the big picture,it's to hear Jesus saying, place your full trust in me
👊🏼Then there'll be a dissipating of any anxiety
👊🏼At that point in proceeding to deposit two cents in our spiritual bank account,
👊🏼Doing our part is essential, cause then the Lord will do the rest and what we yield will help us to reach the top of the heavenly mount
👊🏼Important is chump change, all our efforts and desires adds up when it comes to boarding that non stop heavenly flight
👊🏼An example to take to heart is the case of the widows mite
👊🏼Let's be encouraged and press on & always do our best
👊🏼Be assured Jesus Himself will do the rest
👊🏼For me a little lagniappe is being clothed in Our Lady's mantle and strutting on
👊🏼That way no matter what is going one there will be help to face the unknown
👊🏼Cause hand and hand with Blessed Mother Mary
👊🏼Things will no longer appear very scary
👊🏼It's a fact, her victory is our victory
👊🏼In the end the triumph will be glorious, so grand an experience for you and for me
👊🏼Therefore ain't gonna let nobody or nothing turn me around
👊🏼 As treading the godly way is to know for sure you're walking on solid ground
👊🏼What all of this is really about in my life, just figured it out, it's the pruning of the vine
👊🏼2018 appears to be the appointed Divine time
In Holy Hour, my regular scripture reading from 2 Song of Songs, particularly verse 12, provided the inspiration for the last stanza of this poem. This addition to the poem was an insightful highlight.
Info from this site: http://www.kansas.com/living/religion/article144579679.html
"It’s peaceful in the chapel at 3 in the morning, with only the sound of a softly ticking clock or the occasional rustling from the two men kneeling, one clasping a rosary. Two candles flicker at the sides of the Eucharist, the consecrated bread that the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches has become the actual body, blood and soul of Jesus.
The Eucharist is contained in a monstrance, a container that looks like a circle of gold flame. Steve Freach, one of the two men, remembers the story of a peasant who spent hours in front of the Eucharist. When asked why he did so, the peasant said, “I look at him and he looks at me.”
For 33 years, Freach and Bob Knoff believe they have looked at Jesus and that he has looked back at them as they’ve prayed and meditated at 3 a.m. at Church of the Blessed Sacrament. They’re not the only people in the Catholic Diocese of Wichita who pray and meditate before the Eucharist at unusual hours. Perpetual Eucharistic adoration means never leaving the exposed sacrament alone. Someone must be scheduled to be in an adoration chapel with the Eucharist 24/7, 365 days a year. Perpetual adoration relates to what Christians celebrate on Easter – Christ’s resurrection – said the Rev. John Jirak, pastor of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament. “The spiritual significance is having a real, true known encounter with the Lord,” Jirak said. “There’s different ways God communicates with us. … It’s much richer if you’re able to walk with another person, be actually present with them, and since we truly believe that the Lord is present, there is a different sense of when you’re praying there versus praying in your room.”
When he first began the 3 a.m. shift, he “was on fire,” Freach said. It felt right to be there, and he couldn’t see not doing it. “It’s so peaceful,” Freach said. “I’ve gained so many graces from the prayers I’ve said, the stuff I’ve read.” That’s not to say signing up was his idea – he jokes that he was “hoodwinked.” Perpetual adoration came to the diocese in 1983, not long after Pope John Paul II started it in the Vatican. Someone in the parish called Freach and asked whether he knew anything about perpetual adoration, signed him up for the 3-4 a.m. slot once a week and hung up before he could say anything else about it. Today, he still has the same hour.For Knoff, getting out of bed and spending an hour at the church is no trial. He attributes his 62-year marriage, his six children and their families to the hours he has spent in front of the Eucharist in prayer.
Part of the practice is derived from the story of Jesus’ suffering before his death, when he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked his Disciples to keep watch with him “for one hour.” Instead, they fell asleep. “I don’t want him to someday say, ‘Where were you when I needed you?’ ” said Pat Dwyer, one of the original volunteers who organized perpetual adoration at the church. “It is peaceful. I look forward to it.” For 17 years, Dwyer made sure worshipers were scheduled to be in the chapel all 168 hours of the week. If someone didn’t show up, she made sure there was a replacement. There are only a few pews facing the stone wall and altar that holds the monstrance in the small room. People can come in and pray even if they aren’t scheduled for an hour, and they often do. Freach has seen other people at 3 a.m.
The practice began in the diocese at Blessed Sacrament but has spread. Sixteen of the diocese’s 90 parishes had perpetual adoration in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available. Another 52 parishes had partial adoration daily, weekly or monthly. Our Lady of Guadalupe in Hutchinson has had perpetual adoration since 1995. The Rev. Ned Blick, pastor of the church, said he decided to become a priest while praying in front of the Eucharist. He hears similar stories from other seminarians. “I kind of consider it like the powerhouse of our parish,” Blick said. “It’s like the engine room where there’s this spiritual, ongoing intercession for our people going on all the time.” At Our Lady of Guadalupe, an artist from Mexico painted a life-sized picture of Jesus behind the monstrance, which holds the sacrament where Jesus’ heart would be in the painting.
Blick said the priest who founded the church building in 1964 once returned for a visit and said he noticed a different atmosphere, something attributed to perpetual adoration. “It brings a spiritual aura or spiritual force or protection throughout the whole city,” Blick said. “People who do it over time, it does change them, transform them in a way to be a person of peace.” And many believe that the effects of praying 24/7, 365 days a year has had an even greater impact. Dwyer and her husband, Dick, who worked alongside her to coordinate volunteers, said they believe the practice of adoration is why Wichita has strong Catholic schools and why Blessed Sacrament received an international stewardship award in 2015. They also believe it is why the diocese has so many seminarians, dwarfing the ratio of seminarians from much larger places such as the Archdioceses of Los Angeles or New York. “The Eucharist is the heart of our religion,” Pat Dwyer said. “When you see the host there, it’s a totally different feel. I’m with him. He’s with me.”
Info from this site:
www.spiritualdirection.com/2018/06/02/it-is-in-giving-that-we-receive-part-3-mini-course-on-prayer
Editor's Note: In Part 2, wrote on St. Teresa of Avila's wisdom about going forward in prayer. Today, he will discuss how it is that in giving we receive.
"St. Angela of Foligno calls prayer the ‘School of Divine Love', not just because it is the place where the selflessness that leads to love is learnt, but for something further. In the words of St Francis of Assisi: it is in giving that we receive. In other words, as we try to give ourselves to God in prayer he gives himself to us. In our very endeavour to turn away from distractions in order to raise our hearts and minds to God, our endeavour becomes the channel through which our love rises to God and God's love descends into us. It is only then, as our weak human love is suffused and surcharged by the divine that we can begin to love God like never before. Then we can begin to observe the new commandment that Jesus taught us, which is to love God with our whole heart and mind, with our whole body and soul.
At first glance it might be thought that this is not a new commandment, but the old commandment that the Jews in the Old Testament were taught. Yes, it was given to the Jews in the Old Testament, but they could never observe it as God wanted them to do until Jesus came to show them how. Remember when St Peter told the crowd that the love of God promised in the Old Testament was on that very day being unleashed upon all, he told them to repent or to turn and open their hearts and minds to receive it. However, he told them to do something else too. He told them to be baptised, to undergo the new initiation ceremony. This initiation would not so much mark their entrance into a new organisation, institution, or religion, but their entrance into a person, the person of Jesus himself, now Risen and glorified. So now when they were told to continue repenting, trying to raise their hearts and minds to God, they would do it in Christ. But that is not all, for the same Holy Spirit whom he had sent would so enter into their prayer that now they would be able to pray with him, and through him, to the Father who had sent him in the first place.
The daily battle against distractions now takes on a new meaning, for now it enables us to participate in Christ's death and Resurrection by daily dying ourselves each time we say ‘no' to self and ‘yes' to God. Once prayer is seen in this context then what was originally seen as a pointless activity can be seen as the most important activity that we could ever perform. After all, who would expect that learning the most important thing that any human being can learn would be easy. Learning to love in the ‘School of Divine Love' may not be easy, but it is the most important thing that we can learn, not just for our happiness on earth, but for our ultimate happiness hereafter.
The selflessness learnt in prayer helps us outside of prayer too, as the habit of selflessness enables us to love others, our families, our husbands and wives, our children and others, too, who have need of our love. Now we see that the second of the new commandments becomes possible. It is so often misquoted as commanding us to love others as ourselves. I am afraid that is the teaching of the Old Testament. The second of the new commandments as given to us by Jesus himself is that we should love others as he loves us. This can only become possible when, as we try to love him in prayer, our endeavour becomes the channel that enables his love to enter into us and into our loving, enabling him to love others through us. Our self-love is so deeply rooted within us that it takes a long time and a long spiritual journey trying to practise the two new commandments as Jesus promised at the Last Supper. He comes to make his home in us where his love gradually begins to suffuse our love with his own.
When Our Lady turned and raised her heart and mind to God and said, “Yes”, his Holy Spirit was able to conceive Christ within her immediately, because in her there were no obstacles to his grace. Her Immaculate Conception meant that the sin and selfishness that is in us was never in her, so there was nothing to prevent the instantaneous conception of Jesus within her. Because we are not immaculately conceived, what happened to her instantly can only happen to us gradually, and only if we keep saying, “No” to self, and “Yes” to God in days, or rather in years, practising loving in the ‘School of Divine Love'. As this loving is being learnt, the love of God begins to do in us what was done in Mary, as the obstacles that were never in her are gradually purified away by the fire of the Holy Spirit.
in giving we receiveEventually, as Christ is born again in us, the love received from him overflows outside the special times set aside for prayer to irrigate everything that we say and do in the rest of our lives. In this way we gradually begin to practise the prayer without ceasing, as every moment of our day becomes the time and place where we try to love God in all we do, and through those we try to love. The sacrifices involved in doing this become the offerings that we take with us to Mass. This is the moment when, with the rest of the Christian community we offer up to God, in, with and through Christ, all the sacrifices that we have made as we tried to pray without ceasing throughout the previous week. These sacrifices added to the great sacrifice of Christ himself, enables God to fill us with his love in return, for it is indeed in giving that we receive.
It is important to emphasise that the capacity to receive his love in return will not just be determined by the quality of the love that we try to generate once we have gone into the church, but by the quality of the love that we have generated in the prayers, the good works, and the sacrifices that we have made during the previous week. These are the sacrifices that, when offered at Mass, determine the measure of the love that we will receive in return. It is this love that will enable us to go out and make the rest of our lives into the Mass. For, as the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner put it: “The Mass should so form us that the whole of our lives becomes the Mass, the place where we continually offer ourselves through Christ to the Father. These ideas are developed further in my two major works on prayer – Wisdom from the Western Isles and Wisdom from the Christian Mystics."