Mary TV Daily Reflection 2/24/2011

February 24, 2011

Dear Family of Mary!

"Dear children!  Today I invite you to come still closer to me through prayer.  Little children, I am your mother, I love you and I desire that each of you be saved and thus be with me in Heaven. That is why, little children, pray, pray, pray until your life becomes prayer.  Thank you for having responded to my call." (August 25, 1998)

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Our Lady gives us the central desire of her heart in this message.  She wants us to be with her in Heaven.  She has come to guide us to Heaven.  She is teaching us to pray, so that we will become closer and closer to her and to Jesus and to Heaven.  That is it!  

We really need to desire Heaven and keep the eyes of our hearts focused on it often.  Why? Because it is our hope.  We live in a world in which all things die.  Death is the end of every life.  It's a fact.  We can't run from it.  We can pretend it doesn't happen, live as if it isn't coming, or wish it away, but all the living die.  

I heard a great homily by Fr. Robert Barron recently in which he spoke about this "one way" reality of death.  He said that there are three responses to the reality of our finite earthly existence: optimism, pessimism and hope.  (Here is the link to Fr. Robert Barron's web site, and the audio file of his homily on hope.  You will enjoy Fr. Barron's great teaching style!  I love his website.  http://www.wordonfire.org/WOF-Radio/Sermons/Sermon-Archive-for-2010/Sermon-518-The-Virtue-of-Hope-Third-Sunday-of.aspx  )

 

 

Fr. Barron said that pessimists, like the existential philosophers, see the reality of death as a reason to despair.  Sartre said that in life there is "no exit".  There is no way around death, and there is nothing after death.  On a natural level, Fr. Barron said that the pessimists are right!

The optimists are those who choose to focus on finite life, and believe that they can make it meaningful and good.  He said that by far the most dangerous people in the world are optimists.  They believe that all can be made well here below.  With enough scientific development, enough organization, enough power they can make life great.  Optimists are men like Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Mao...they were optimists.  They would go to any extreme to make their dream happen, and so human dignity and many lives were sacrificed for their ideals.

The third response to death is hope. Hope doesn't give up on life, and it doesn't center its energies on this life, but it grasps the reality of life after death with God, in Heaven.  Fr. Barron said, "Hope is that supernatural virtue which orders our desire toward heaven and the things of heaven."  Hope points us towards the life to come, the promise of eternal joy with God that has been given to us.  "It is not something we should hope for within the context and the 

 

 Pope John Paul II

confines of this world, but a realization that will occur through the power of God in a transfigured world to come."  Heaven exists outside of our earthly reality, and it is real!  That is our hope.  

Fr. Barron listed some people of our time who operated in hope and ended up changing our world for the better, even now.  "Dorothy Day, Mother Theresa of Calcutta, Martin Luther King, John Paul II.  They were not optimists, they were people of hope."  

Heaven is our hope, and Our Lady is trying very hard to keep that hope alive in us in these difficult days.  She comes every day to instill that hope of heaven, and indeed to help us experience at bit of heaven through her coming!  We are people of hope.  We believe in God, and we believe in Heaven.  We have a way out of the "no exit" world - that is the door to Heaven and it is held open for us by Jesus, our Savior!  We are people of hope!

In Jesus and Mary!

 

Cathy Nolan

PS.  All the quotes from Fr. Barron came from his homily on Hope.  Again, here is the link:

http://www.wordonfire.org/WOF-Radio/Sermons/Sermon-Archive-for-2010/Sermon-518-The-Virtue-of-Hope-Third-Sunday-of.aspx

 

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