Collect: Almighty God, every good thing comes from you. Fill our hearts with love for you, increase our faith, and by your constant care protect the good you have given us. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Friday of the Twenty-Second Week of Ordinary Time
Please join Bishop Peter Sartain and Joliet (IL) Diocese Catholics in a day of prayer and penance today. Planned Parenthood is opening a massive abortion mill in Aurora IL. and Bishop Sartain has asked that Catholics everywhere join in prayer for the promotion of a Culture of Life and an end to abortion. He asked that we "Pray in the manner of your choosing - perhaps attend Mass that day, pray the rosary or other favorite prayers, for the intention of an increased respect for the sacredness of life. Choose a simple penance in keeping with your health and daily duties - abstain from meat or sweets that day, or refrain from television or other entertainment. Such simple efforts on our part can be a powerful witness to our neighbors and a sign to our Heavenly Father that we love the life - the lives - he has given us.
"May we never tire of proclaiming the dignity and worth of every human life. May we never tire of serving the vulnerable and their caregivers with generous hearts. And may we never cease to pray for the day when all people, and all societies, will defend the life of every human from conception to natural death."
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