My Blessed Virgin Mother,
Grant that I may have one of your cardinal virtues - incessant prayer. May I become more worthy to draw down your intercession, that my spare time will be spent offering up the incense of petitions that draw myself and others close to your Divine Son.
Give me the spirit of self-denial, physical and spiritual alike, to make my prayers more constant and effective. May I, like so many of your sons and daughters have over the generations, discover the joys of penance, fasting and mortification of the senses, and a deep brokeness of spirit marked by pure contrition.
Have mercy on me, for your Son's sake - for the sake of His sorrowful Passion.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Holy Mary, pray for your children. . .
Especially those who do not yet know the tender love of a Heavenly Mother, who do not yet know that they need intimate contact with your Divine Son in the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Draw them close, Blessed Mother of God, to give glory to your Son and bring honor to your Immaculate Heart. . .
Draw them close, Blessed Mother of God, to give glory to your Son and bring honor to your Immaculate Heart. . .
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Thoughts on confessing sins. . .
As a newly confirmed Catholic, I must say that setting the record straight about my past sins has been the most crucial process I've had to go through in order to arrive at a clear conscience.
Thank God for priests and confessors - for all the bad press, they play such a vital role in the life of believers that for the mere fact that their office is indispensable, there will always be somebody called by God to serve in their posts.
The popular Protestant belief that our past sins aren't held against us once we profess Christ as Lord and Savior is fundamentally correct, but for an interesting twist: it is never God who is unwilling or unable to forgive, but we as human beings have such fragile and flayed consciences as a result of our sin-stained lives that unless we openly confess our transgressions to persons of authority and perform penance for them, we'll be unable to forgive ourselves. And in the end, to not be able to forgive oneself is to not be able to receive God's forgiveness.
Hence the importance of confession and penance: for those who truly receive the sacrament, it is nothing less than the commutation of a harsh criminal sentence to a ridiculously light penalty, if not an outright declaration of "not guilty" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Thank God for priests and confessors - for all the bad press, they play such a vital role in the life of believers that for the mere fact that their office is indispensable, there will always be somebody called by God to serve in their posts.
The popular Protestant belief that our past sins aren't held against us once we profess Christ as Lord and Savior is fundamentally correct, but for an interesting twist: it is never God who is unwilling or unable to forgive, but we as human beings have such fragile and flayed consciences as a result of our sin-stained lives that unless we openly confess our transgressions to persons of authority and perform penance for them, we'll be unable to forgive ourselves. And in the end, to not be able to forgive oneself is to not be able to receive God's forgiveness.
Hence the importance of confession and penance: for those who truly receive the sacrament, it is nothing less than the commutation of a harsh criminal sentence to a ridiculously light penalty, if not an outright declaration of "not guilty" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
No enemies except. . . myself
Haven't opened up the Psalms all that much since deciding to become Catholic. . . randomly opened up to Psalm 57, in which King David rails against his enemies:
Let death take them by surprise; let them go down alive to Sheol, for evil is in their homes and hearts.
But I will call upon God, and the LORD will save me. -Psalm 55:16-17
I must say that since becoming devoted to Mary, it's hard to relate to Psalms like this one in the sense that I can't see anyone around me as an enemy anymore - that is, nobody can separate me from the love of God nearly as much as myself.
This is such a precious gift from the Blessed Virgin: the awareness of such a deep sinfulness within us owing to the disordered state caused by inborn Original Sin, which baptism only starts the removal of. Everything becomes quite simple when the struggle is largely, indeed more and more exclusively with our own flesh: the traitor within who God must necessarily put to death over and over again, often by surprise and unexpected afflictions. At some point, we get so accustomed to these little deaths - the painful mortification of our wills - and we see that God is so faithful to rescue us from them that we can actually put ourselves to death of our own free will!
Such is the way of the Cross. . . the only way to the ultimate, beatific vision of the Holy Trinity.
And yes, if we are our own worst enemies, it follows that everyone around us - whether they treat us well or badly - is by comparison a good friend!
Let death take them by surprise; let them go down alive to Sheol, for evil is in their homes and hearts.
But I will call upon God, and the LORD will save me. -Psalm 55:16-17
I must say that since becoming devoted to Mary, it's hard to relate to Psalms like this one in the sense that I can't see anyone around me as an enemy anymore - that is, nobody can separate me from the love of God nearly as much as myself.
This is such a precious gift from the Blessed Virgin: the awareness of such a deep sinfulness within us owing to the disordered state caused by inborn Original Sin, which baptism only starts the removal of. Everything becomes quite simple when the struggle is largely, indeed more and more exclusively with our own flesh: the traitor within who God must necessarily put to death over and over again, often by surprise and unexpected afflictions. At some point, we get so accustomed to these little deaths - the painful mortification of our wills - and we see that God is so faithful to rescue us from them that we can actually put ourselves to death of our own free will!
Such is the way of the Cross. . . the only way to the ultimate, beatific vision of the Holy Trinity.
And yes, if we are our own worst enemies, it follows that everyone around us - whether they treat us well or badly - is by comparison a good friend!
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The walk of dark faith. . . Marian apologetics
The devotion to Mary is an invitation to the dry, dark faith of our Blessed Mother - the faith that won her the singular grace of becoming the Mother of Jesus Christ.
Venerated so highly by saints and mystics, the Blessed Virgin is in fact the great hidden gem of the Christian faith: over the centuries, she has truly tended to elude the grasp of the wise and scholarly, even as she has won the affection of legions of childlike devotees.
Take, for instance, the view of Mary as Queen of Heaven, her identity being that of the woman in Revelation 12:1-6, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. Apparently, it wasn't until the late 4th century that a single scholar of St. John's apocalyptic writings identified the woman as the Virgin Mary: then, as now, the vast majority of commentators identify the woman as the Church, or the nation of Israel. Granted, Revelation wasn't included in the sacred canon until the 5th century, and Mary herself wasn't officially declared Mother of God or God-bearer until the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, but it's really striking that ancient scholars were rather slow to attach to Mary the singular centrality of her role in salvation history that much later medieval Christians took for granted.
Similarly with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception: though it was a long-established item of faith for rank-and-file believers for generations, even throughout the High Middle Ages it wasn't accepted by such strong devotees to Mary as St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Thomas Aquinas. Throughout those centuries, it was decidedly the minority view of learned Catholic minds: no surprise, then, that it wasn't until 1854 that it officially became dogma.
What does this seem to illustrate? Like the nature of her faith in God, Mary's true significance to the Church is far more a matter of childlike trust than logical sense. All devotees to Mary who wish to spread the devotion to her should recognize this: the odds are probably stacked up against us in the realm of apologetics, because if we're honest with the history of the interpretation of scripture as concerns Mary, we'll find that even Catholics can take much issue with certain high views and doctrines of her. We who wish to defend such high Mariologies must be prepared to cling to the lowest common denominator: so long as scripture can be demonstrated to not contradict what we believe about our Mother, the rest is a matter of pure, dark faith for us.
There's a certain beauty to this: this walk of dark faith is a very dark walk, indeed!
Venerated so highly by saints and mystics, the Blessed Virgin is in fact the great hidden gem of the Christian faith: over the centuries, she has truly tended to elude the grasp of the wise and scholarly, even as she has won the affection of legions of childlike devotees.
Take, for instance, the view of Mary as Queen of Heaven, her identity being that of the woman in Revelation 12:1-6, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. Apparently, it wasn't until the late 4th century that a single scholar of St. John's apocalyptic writings identified the woman as the Virgin Mary: then, as now, the vast majority of commentators identify the woman as the Church, or the nation of Israel. Granted, Revelation wasn't included in the sacred canon until the 5th century, and Mary herself wasn't officially declared Mother of God or God-bearer until the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, but it's really striking that ancient scholars were rather slow to attach to Mary the singular centrality of her role in salvation history that much later medieval Christians took for granted.
Similarly with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception: though it was a long-established item of faith for rank-and-file believers for generations, even throughout the High Middle Ages it wasn't accepted by such strong devotees to Mary as St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Thomas Aquinas. Throughout those centuries, it was decidedly the minority view of learned Catholic minds: no surprise, then, that it wasn't until 1854 that it officially became dogma.
What does this seem to illustrate? Like the nature of her faith in God, Mary's true significance to the Church is far more a matter of childlike trust than logical sense. All devotees to Mary who wish to spread the devotion to her should recognize this: the odds are probably stacked up against us in the realm of apologetics, because if we're honest with the history of the interpretation of scripture as concerns Mary, we'll find that even Catholics can take much issue with certain high views and doctrines of her. We who wish to defend such high Mariologies must be prepared to cling to the lowest common denominator: so long as scripture can be demonstrated to not contradict what we believe about our Mother, the rest is a matter of pure, dark faith for us.
There's a certain beauty to this: this walk of dark faith is a very dark walk, indeed!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Mother of God, pray for us
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners in this season of Lent: that we will earnestly seek and practice the virtues you so perfectly embody, as the one and only Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, singularly worthy to intercede on behalf of poor sinners who need your mercy. . .
May this be a season of self-sacrifice in place of self-centeredness, penance in place of presumption, humility in place of self-sufficiency, godly sorrow in place of frivolous worldly happiness, desperation for lost and dying sinners in place of complacency.
So little time, so much at stake. . . don't give our souls rest, Holy Mother, in the wrong way - inflame us with love and tender mercy, that we will earnestly desire those who seem furthest away from your Son to be put first in line to reach paradise and attain His promises.
May this be a season of self-sacrifice in place of self-centeredness, penance in place of presumption, humility in place of self-sufficiency, godly sorrow in place of frivolous worldly happiness, desperation for lost and dying sinners in place of complacency.
So little time, so much at stake. . . don't give our souls rest, Holy Mother, in the wrong way - inflame us with love and tender mercy, that we will earnestly desire those who seem furthest away from your Son to be put first in line to reach paradise and attain His promises.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Spotless Immaculate Virgin, I love you!
This is just one of those moments, I must admit that I'm such a guy :-)
God is a guy, after all - three guys, Father, Spirit and Son - so how natural it is that the focus of His passion and affection is a young woman!
If only motherless Christians knew just how much they're missing out on to not deeply love and be loved by our Holy Mother!
God is a guy, after all - three guys, Father, Spirit and Son - so how natural it is that the focus of His passion and affection is a young woman!
If only motherless Christians knew just how much they're missing out on to not deeply love and be loved by our Holy Mother!
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