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Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Feria

First Reading:
Psalm:
Gospel:

Colossians 3:1-11
Psalm 145:2-3, 10-13
Luke 6:20-26

So, you will ask me, who then are the people most tempted? They are these, my friends; note them carefully. The people most tempted are those who are ready, with the grace of God, to sacrifice everything for the salvation of their poor souls, who renounce all those things which most people eagerly seek. It is not one devil only who tempts them, but millions seek to entrap them.

-- St. John Vianney

Catholic Culture

Collect:
God our Father, you redeem us and make us your children in Christ. Look upon us, give us true freedom and bring us to the inheritance you promised. Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Activities:

Prayers:

» September Devotion: Our Lady of Sorrows

September 07, 2005

Wednesday of the Twenty-Third Week of Ordinary Time

Happy are you when people hate you, drive you out, abuse you, denounce your name as criminal, on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice when that day comes and dance for joy, for then your reward will be great in heaven. This was the way their ancestors treated the prophets (Luke 6:22-23).

Meditation - The Descent from the Cross: Jesus Restored to His Mother
And now the moment more bitter than aloes: Jesus is delivered into His Mother's arms. He is dead. The dagger is buried finally and forever in that heart which was destined to become its sheath. Now it is no longer her eyes which watch, which understand, and give evidence. This Jesus, who was just on the cross, has been again laid in her arms. She embraces Him, she holds Him, she supports Him, she contains Him. At last it is hers, this lifeless body from which the soul has fled—her Son and her God. She holds it in her lap.

Here is the first moment of complete possession which has been granted her since the days of Bethlehem and Nazareth, a moment of perfect union between the consummated Christ and this woman who is the Church, now' confirmed forever in her maternal ordination. And surely we cannot think that those lips which He offered to Judas and chastised Simon for not seeking are now denied His mother. For now He depends on her alone, He has been placed completely in her hands—length, breadth, and weight—this Christ whom she has just watched being unfastened limb by limb from that rigid framework which held Him fixed to the ancient Law.

Electe ramos, arbor alta! Now it is she who is the cross: she has become the scale on which is weighed that "eternal weight of glory" [II Cor. 4:17] before which, unlike Moses, she does not shrink. It is she who will henceforth be the human stalk and stem of this Christ five times opened.' He is her impression, and she is his expression.

Excerpted from I Believe in God by Paul Claudel