Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Mary TV Daily Reflection 11/6/2013




(c)Mary TV 2013


J.M.J.
November 6, 2013

Dear Family of Mary!

"Dear Children! Today, more than ever, I am calling you to pray. May your life become a continuous prayer. Without love you cannot pray. That is why I am calling you to love God, the Creator of your lives, above everything else. Then you will come to know God and will love Him in everything as He loves you. Dear children, it is a grace that I am with you. That is why you should accept and live my messages for your own good. I love you and that is why I am with you, in order to teach you and to lead you to a new life of conversion and renunciation. Only in this way will you discover God and all that which now seems so far away from you. Therefore, my dear children, pray. Thank you for having responded to my call." (November 25, 1992)

"Live my messages for your own good." That is the point. Nothing Our Lady says to us can be contrary to our good. She is our Mother, and she only wants our good. So her messages are designed for our good. Here is part 2 of Fr. Benny McHale's homily of October 24, 2013:

That leads on to the next one, the one of prayer, because again, "Happy the man who ponders his law day and night." That is prayer. We are pondering our relationship with God. And Our Lady asks that we set time aside each day to spend time with her Son in prayer. Because as we quoted at the beginning, "You've made us for you, Oh Lord, and our hearts will never find rest until they rest in You." It's amazing how much junk food has been introduced into our souls and we wonder why we are not happy. We watch programs on television that are full of violence and then we wonder then why we are disturbed. If we take the kingdom of God seriously we have to open our hearts to the source of truth, Jesus Christ Himself, the Son of Mary.

And above all she asks us to pray the Rosary, that powerful weapon. Because the Rosary is looking at Jesus through the eyes of His Mother, the one who loved Him the most, who was with Him at the critical moments of His life, and as we do that, she shares them with us so that we will want, like the lovely prayer children say at confession, "Help me to live like Jesus."

The fourth one is Confession. And again, St. Paul mentions in his first reading today that now that you've been set free from sin, by the work of Jesus on the Cross, but now the important thing is to stay free. Because if we don't, as the old Catechism used to say, "He that contemneth small things, shall fall little by little." We've been set free, Confession once a month keeps us free. It doesn't allow the corrosion of sin to seep into our hearts and it keeps us aware of how far we have to go.

And the last one of all is the Eucharist. And maybe that's why today I split up the Gospel today to split up the two messages. Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth." It is the Eucharist that brings that fire to us. Did you ever hear the word, "enthusiasm"? It comes from the lovely Greek word. The Greek word for God is "Theos" and "enTheos" is to have God inside you. And if you have God inside you, you are enthusiastic. And that is what people want to see. I'm sure you have come across people of other faiths, especially the Muslim people, who are so enthusiastic about their faith. And they want you to convert to their faith. I often wonder if that is why the Church is the way it is, because we are so lukewarm in our faith. The Lord is challenging us to get that fire into our bellies. To believe. He brought you here so that you would play your part in the conversion.

The Eucharist is God in us. In a few moments, Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Universe, is going to come into your soul. And if that doesn't produce fire, then I don't know what will. Really, He wants to fire us up.

And the last message you will hear at the Mass today is "Go in Peace to love and serve the Lord." We are sent out as ambassadors to go preach to the world the richness, the fire of Christ. We are sent to set the world on fire. But it can only happen if each one of us becomes fire.

The problem is, the Gospel tells us, that you may pay a price for that, mother against daughter, brother against brother, father against son, because people in your very own family may be the people who are opposed to what you are doing. The may say things to you like, "What are you doing going off to Medjugorje? Why don't you go to a nice seaside resort and have a good time? If they only knew the good time we are having here....They may have a sun tan, but we have an inner sun tan, the sun tan of God's love shining in our hearts. You can't buy that, it's a gift.

The way we participate in the Eucharist is by offering the self-sacrifice of our lives with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. That is what the Eucharist is about, and I often ask myself what sacrifice have I brought today? What denials have I done so that I can unite them with the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross? The Lord gave up his life for me. It's a bit like the wife who was reading the Bible, and she came upon a passage while her husband was sleeping, "There is no greater love than this, that you lay down your life for your friends." So about three o'clock in the morning she woke her husband up and said, "Pat I want to ask you a question. Do you love me?" Now what do you think he is going to say at 3 o'clock in the morning? He said, "Of course I love you, now go back to sleep." "No," she said, "it says here that the greatest love you could have is to lay down your life for your friend. Would you die for me?" "I would not," he said, "Mine is an undying love."

Well the kind of love that Jesus has for us is a "dying love". And in doing so He challenges us to die to sin so we can live for Christ, and that is what our Mass is all about. You will find a lot of opposition, because the Kingdom of Darkness is powerful. It is the fire of love that you get here at the Eucharist that enables us to keep going. But sadly for a lot of people, the fire has gone out. They have lost their faith, they have lost their way. And we are challenged to not only light the fire in ourselves, but to use the Lord to ignite that fire in their hearts. And as I said, the opposition will often come from your own families.

I remember once doing a Lexio Divino on this Gospel, and everybody was saying that it didn't apply to us. And then somebody said, "Yes, but look at all the families that fall out over wills, when the will is read! And there was one man who prevented that. When the family gathered to hear the will, they all thought they were going to get a big sum of money, because they knew he had money. And in the will there was just one line which said, "Being of sound mind, I spent all my money before I died." Wasn't he a wise man!

And another lady told me she was a chaplain in a mining community over in England during the miners' strike. And she literally saw fathers and sons fighting because the fathers wanted to go to work in the mines, and the sons were on strike. She saw them boxing each other, father against son. Lots of things can divide us.

But the great divide is those in the Kingdom of Light and those in the Kingdom of Darkness. And I just hope you can all take home a little candle with you, for yourselves, and leave it on your little altar. And let that candle ask you every day with your morning offering, "Lord what light am I going to bring into my world today?" We were created to reflect the light of Christ. It's like the argument between the sun and the moon about which is the most important. The moon said, "I am more important because when you go to bed at night, I am still shining." And the sun said, "Yes, but you have no light of your own. All you do is reflect my light." Each one of us is called to reflect the light of Christ into our world. And so I would ask you to get the book of messages, read them and apply them, and ask the Lord to set you on fire with the enthusiasm of His love so you can play your part in the building up of God's kingdom.

I hope you all have a happy journey, and that when you come back you can say "My church is more alive! Why? Because I'm alive."

Thank you, Fr. McHale. We want to live Our Lady's messages, for our own good and the good of the whole church and the whole world!

In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
© Mary TV 2013





Logo



 "Medjugorje is the spiritual center of the world!"   
Blessed John Paul II  -
Be connected! 
 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please no anonymous comments. I require at least some way for people to address each other personally and courteously. Having some name or handle helps.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.