First Sunday of Advent

Today is the first Sunday of Advent and the message of the Gospel is ""Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come." We are called to live each day as if it were our last day on earth.
The alternate prayer sets the tone for the Advent season:
Father in heaven, our hearts desire the warmth of your love and our minds are searching for the light of your Word.
Increase our longing for Christ our Savior and give us the strength to grow in love,
that the dawn of his coming may find us rejoicing in his presence and welcoming the light of his truth.
The first reading from Isaiah 63 is worth reflecting on and ends with "Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you the potter:we are the work of your hands. Let us all be alert as we begin these weeks of preparation for the coming of Jesus again! Let us spend the time with Mary and ask her to prepare our hearts to receive her Son! Above all, let us be alert, filled with desire, and remember that we are in the hands of our potter who is molding us!
I want to share this passage from Janet Erskine Stuart on Advent that is taken from our network schools website but quoted for the Virtual Community of Prayer for the Reflection this Sunday:
What kind of spirit is the spirit of preparation? It is alert, expectant, diligent,quiet, patient...Watchfulness for what is coming does not exempt us from present exertion, or allow us to become unsettled, but it impresses upon us all the more deeply the necessity to exert ourselves. Preparation is spoilt by impatience and want of resignation...Few things are so restless, unsatisfactory and useless as impatient waiting-especially following on hurried preparation, and one of the hardest and gravest lessons is to learn to wait with patience and resignation. If Advent adds any of these qualities to our spirit of preparation, it will have been well spent.

Spiritual Wanderings

This is really the last day of the Liturgical Year; I want to take some time today to look back over the year and be accountable for my interior life.
Where have my spiritual wanderings taken me this past year? I remember my days of retreat last Advent and my desire to grow in union with God; my desire and my resolution to make time for prayer each afternoon (a resolution that has not been kept well and therefore I know it was a needed one). I was also going to find time for more spiritual reading. I am glad I have time for prolonged prayer each morning as after that I am caught up in things that are not always essential and do not find quiet time to just be. Centering Prayer on Mondays at the University has been one constant since I started a group there over twenty years ago. It is a great way to begin the week!
My spiritual wanderings have led me to reflect more on the value of relationships and to try to stay in touch with many now scattered all over the world. I have wandered deeper inside my own heart this past year and found much to uproot. Perhaps this Advent will be a time of pulling up interior weeds, casting out clutter, making a lovely garden for the Lord Jesus to come and rest there.
The path is well marked but needs to be cleared, raked smooth, and tended with vigilance as the stones and weeds of selfishness keep appearing in various forms to clog the path. Weeds can choke joy.
Advent is a time of hope and waiting; it is also a time of preparation. What is your hope?

God's Presence

What signs in your life point to God's presence within you? This is a question that makes me reflect that when my soul is at peace, I am more aware of God's presence but he is with me in the puzzled moments of my day, too. The Spirit within helps us to discern, but when I stop and am aware of God being present, then I am also aware of a sense of peace, joy, and gratitude.
In today's Gospel, Jesus says, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." When I stop to listen, I hear Jesus speaking in my heart words such as, "Fear not; I am with you." Sometimes it is "Remain in my love" or "I have chosen you..." What words do you hear?

I have a few quotes that I want to share with you today from my Journal that is now filled: The first is from St. John Vianney, the Cure de Ars, "Prayer is nothing else than union with God. When our hearts are pure and united to God, we feel within ourselves a joy, a sweetness that inebriates, a light that dazzles us. It is a happiness that we cannot understand."

This is from John Maiin: "By stillness in the spirit we move in the ocean of God."
And finally, one that I am sure I have shared with you before from Don Marmion: "Joy is the echo of God's life in you.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

Thanksgiving is a day set aside to give thanks. It has always been a special holiday. We have so much to be grateful for and it is nice to have a national holiday that reminds us that we are to give thanks for our many gifts.
It is good to make a litany of gratitude beginning with the gift of life; mine would start out:
Thank you, Lord, for the gift of life;
Thank you, Lord, for the gift of family, of friends, of relatives near and far;
Thank you, Lord, for the world around me, for sun and moon, and evening star;
Thank you, Lord, for teachers and mentors, for all who taught and guided me;
Thank you, Lord, for health to serve You, for ears to hear and eyes to see;
Thank you, Lord, for for the gift of water; for the oceans, the lakes, the rivers;
Thank you, Lord, for food and shelter; a loving home and many homes since leaving all; Thank you, Lord, for letting me hear your call.

And so on... I will let each of you do your own litany fo gratitude on this Thanksgiving Day!

More on "Practical Gratitude"

I picked up a book, "50 Ways to Pray" and scanned the contents and saw nothing that indicated a prayer of gratitude. However, as I began to look at some of the many ways to pray, I realized that all ended with a definite way to thank God.
I am going to begin a new Journal on the First Sunday of Advent. I hope it will be mostly a Journal of gratitude and joy. I plan to write what I am most grateful for each day and to be aware of where I have felt joy that day. I want to write about one of the moments of joy each day; I want to relive it with God to see how it was life-giving and thank God for that moment of joy.
One part of my Journal will be for favorite quotations that I find in my readings; one part for monthly reviews of my life that are always helpful in preparing for spiritual direction and the Sacrament of Reconciliation; I suspect I will need to have a place for Creative Thoughts, too. I would add a section for dreams, but seldom remember my dreams so will just have the four sections and I am excited about beginning a new Journal.
For those of my readers who do not keep a Journal, I suggest you begin one. I find my Journal helps me to reflect after prayer and be more attentive to God; when I stop writing, I think I also stop some inner reflection that puts me not only in touch with God but with the ways God comes to me in people, events, and circumstances.

Practical Gratitude

Today is the birthday of my brother, John, and my grand-niece, Theresa. John, the baby of our family, was born on Thanksgiving and will be sixty-five today! We had eaten our Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother's when my mother told us that she thought she should go to the hospital instead of going home. Two of my aunts took her while my Dad took us home; my grandmother came to take care of us as my brother George was not yet two years old. Birthdays make me feel grateful for the gift of life. I am still pondering this quote from St. Madeleine Sophie: "We must respond to so many benefits by a practical gratitude."
What did she mean by a practical gratitude? I think it means putting our gratitude into practice by thanking, showing in concrete ways that one is truly grateful. We receive so many gifts daily from God and need to live an attitude of gratefulness, thanking for these many gifts and expressing our gratitude by returning his love and loving others as what we do to the least we do to him.
Happy Birthday John! Happy Birthday Theresa! Happy Birthday Joe!

Encouragement always needed

Mountain climbers encourage one another. I think the martyrs also drew strength from one another. Today we celebrate St. Andrew Dung-Lac, St.Peter Thi, and the Vietnamese martyrs. The students in my International On-line Certificate Program in Spirituality Studies have been impressed by the martyrs in the early church. In Vietnam, between the 17th and 19th centuries, there were over 130,000 Christians martyred. Among them were the two priests we celebrate today; they were beheaded on December 21, 1839.

When visiting in England last month I looked at a book "Patterns of Prayer" by Eugene McCaffrey,O.C.D.(Paulist Press, 2003). I found that this book says exactly what I believe and teach about prayer. Here are a few notes I took - they also may be mixed with my own thoughts! His first chapter, "Getting Started" has this bit of wisdom: The only way to begin to pray is to begin."
Encouragement is what we all need most in prayer.
Prayer is simple, but not easy! Simple because God loves each one of us personally and uniquely and prayer is basically6 a response to that love. We complicate it.
Real prayer is as real as the life we live and one cannot be separated from the other. The one condition essential to prayer is the desire to want to pray.

I will end today with a quote from St. Madeleine Sophie that I am mulling over:
"Be simple. Only at this price will you acquire peace, and if to this peace you join silence, you will soon be holy."
So let us encourage one another in prayer and let us be simple and silent as we go about our daily tasks.

Feast of Christ the King

The Feast of Christ the King was moved to the Sunday before Advent as it is fitting to close the Liturgical year contemplating the Kingship of Christ.
We have been looking at the end time and today's Gospel reminds us that when Christ will come in glory we shall also be judged. Our judgment is not on what we have accomplished but on love - how we have kept the corporal works of mercy. Jesus tells us that what we have done for the least of these - the lonely, the sick, the prisoner, the needy one, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, - we have done for him. Will I be the sheep that he invites into his Kingdom or the goat who is thrown out?
Sometimes an opportunity to help someone passes and we have not done what was needed; it makes us feel sad. Instead, we must be on the lookout for where we can help anyone in need. It is often the person next to us so we do not have far to go to find the needy.
I love the first reading from Ezechiel: Thus says the Lord God: I myself will look after and tend my sheep. As a shepherd tends his flock when he finds himself among his scattered sheep, so will I tend my sheep. I will rescue them from every place where they were scattered when it was cloudy and dark. I myself will pasture my sheep; I myself will give them rest, says the Lord God. The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy, shepherding them rightly.

Feast of St. Cecila

Today is the feast of St. Cecilia, a Roman martyr from the second or third century. She is patron of musicians. Her name is mentioned in the first Eucharistic prayer as the early Church had a special veneration for her. I read in "Living with Christ" that her association with music stems from the story that at her wedding feast "she sang to God in her heart." I hope we all are singing to God in our hearts as we prepare for Thanksgiving. I sometimes try to sing out loud what my heart wants to say to God, but only when alone in my car!
I must add that what gave me devotion to her was a special treat for the choir on her feast day when I was at boarding school.!

I want to share with you this prayer of St. Philippine Duchesne:
Lord, you alone are the center in which I find rest.
Give me your arm to support me,
Your shoulder to carry me,
Your heart to lean upon,
Your cross to uphold me,
Your body to nourish me.
In you, Lord, I sleep and rest in peace.

I probably will shorten it today to "Lord, give me your heart to lean upon."

Feast of the Presentation of Mary

Today is the Feast of the Presentation of Mary in the Temple as a child and it is also the birthday of the Society of the Sacred Heart as we celebrate November 21, 1800 as the birth of our congregation. It has been a wonderful 208 years for us and Mary has played an important part in all of our lives and the lives of our students. We are consecrated to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. I guess each of us honor her in very different ways; I have found that she has been so present in my life at difficult moments. She always seems to have one message and it is what she told the servants at the Wedding feast after pointing out the lack of wine to her son, Jesus. She said only "Do whatsoever he tells you." That has helped me to hear her say that to me so often and she gives the strength we need so we also can say, "Let it be done to me according to your word" - a simple phrase that changed the world!
Mary, Queen of Peace, be with us in our troubled world!

Strong souls: Philippine Duchesne and Dorothy Day

I felt the need to quote again from The Duty of Delight as I am still reading Dorothy Day's Diaries. This is found on p. 298 for June 7, 1960:
"The other day when writing my article and appeal I threw away my article telling of all our troubles and thought 'this is not what our readers want--to be tortured with tales of broken families, men beating their wives and children, etc.'
I will write happily of June and its beauties. Of course, if you do this you get a double share of complaints from all around you who try to make you see how bad everything is. Still you cannot help but help others by our own repose and joy if you try to maintain it."
So let us remain calm and joyful no matter what the news tells us; we can be moved to compassion and love, but in a deep peace and joy as we know we are loved by God and God loves us and our world and God can do anything! Let us trust and show forth his love and joy in our lives today!
One last bit about St. Philippine Duchesne - Carrollton, the Sacred Heart school in Miami, had a lovely Liturgy in her honor on the Feast and sang one of my favorite hymns to Philippine that I even taught the children in Chile. The words are worth reflecting on so I am copying them here:
Strong was her heart that heard God's voice
When far it called across the sea,
And swiftly came the answer of her love
That gave its all triumphantly.
For thou were ready, Philippine, to let God's zeal take fire in thee!

Hard was the road beneath her fee,
And long it stretched through shadowed years,
But stronger was the love that led her on
And brave the faith that conquered fears;
For God was with thee, Philippine, and drew His harvest from thy tears.

Both St. Philippine and Dorothy Day were strong women who lived for others; women who embraced poverty and who sought to live humble lives full of love for God and others.

St. Philippine's tomb

The first picture is of the little shrine where Philippine was entombed after her canonization. She had been buried before in the cemetery on the grounds. When I was at school, some of us went out every night to pray to Philippine at the shrine and then blow out the green and amber vigil lights that outlined her tomb stone. She was like a mother for us and we confided all our hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows to her. Later, in view of the many pilgrimages that come to St. Charles to pray to Philippine, the new shrine was built. It is a real place of prayer and welcomes many who leave their written petitions there.
I wanted to share this quote about her from Father Gavin Duffy, SJ:
What have we learned from her?
The value of steadfast purpose,
the success of failure and the
unimportance of our standards of success;
the power of grace released by deep, divine desires
and simple duty daily done.

May we always learn this from our St. Philippine Duchesne.