DO NOT TAKE AWAY YOUR MERCY FROM US

If you ask for it, you will get it! If you don’t, you won’t! I am speaking of God’s mercy.  “Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete”, Jesus said (Jo 16, 24). True, Jesus was not speaking about mercy here, but about anything we might want to ask of the Father in Christ’s name”.

“Why do we ask for God’s mercy so often and in every Mass?” God never gets tired of offering us his mercy; we easily get tired of asking for it. What we ask for, we are better prepared to accept!

In today’s first reading we read part of Azariah’s prayer while standing in the furnace into which he and two other young persons were thrown because they did not want to sacrifice to a golden statue king Nebuchadnezzar had set up. In his prayer Azariah asked God “Do not take away your mercy from us”.

Can God ever deprive us of His mercy? No, because if He did, we would cease to exist! And then, God’s mercy is an expression of His boundless love. Who can deprive us of God’s mercy? We can! Each one of us can! How?

MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS, NOR ARE YOUR WAYS MY WAYS

My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. I chose this quote from Isaiah 55, 8 because it sheds a light on today’s bible readings (2 Kgs 5:1-15 and Lk 4:24-30)  and will help me in my reflection. 

There is this Naaman, a Syrian and an army commander. He was highly esteemed and he was valiant, but he was a leper. A little girl, a servant of the leper’s wife, spoke about a prophet who could cure her master. Naaman obtained permission to seek the prophet, but when he reached Elisha’s house, the prophet did not come out to meet him, but sent a message to the leper and told him to go and wash himself seven times in the River Jordan. Naaman was angry and went away saying: “I thought that he would surely come out and stand there to invoke the Lord his God, and would move his hand over the spot, and thus cure the leprosy.” His servants convinced him that if the prophet had asked him to do something extraordinary he would have done it and he went to the river, washed and he was cured.

Jesus mentioned this healing in today’s gospel as one of two examples of how “no prophet is accepted in his own native place”.  The people in the synagogue of Nazareth were angry at Christ’s words and drove him out of town in order to kill him. “But he passed through the midst of them and went away”.

Let’s walk with Christ

Palm Sunday

A reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Philipians (2, 5-11)

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

This is the Word of the Lord

Today the Church celebrates Palm Sunday, and today’s liturgy points to the mystery we will be celebrating throughout the following week and which finds its highest point in the Celebration of Easter. Today, palms which were used by all nations as a sign of joy and victory, and which the Church has also adapted as a symbol for martyrs, are blessed and carried in procession as a sort of re-enactment of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

Bearing witness, being church: Dominican sisters in Iraq

Please read this post published on National Catholic Reporter
February 7-8, 2015
Thank you.

By Dawn Cherie Araujo  

In the middle of makeshift refugee camps, the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena are trying to make life work. They get up every morning for prayer, and then they spend the rest of the day visiting the thousands of Iraqi refugees living in the abandoned malls and unfinished construction sites of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. The sisters would like to open schools for the children, but for now they're making do with a Montessori kindergarten that's run out of an apartment.

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Pope Francis: Did I learn to cry...?

Please watch and meditate on this video.

DO NOT STOP LOOKING FOR HIM

God has become man. He has become a child. Thus he fulfills the great and mysterious promise to be Emmanuel: God-with-us. Now he is no longer unreachable for anybody. God is Emmanuel. By becoming a child, he offers us the possibility of being on familiar terms with him.

I am reminded here of a rabbinical tale recorded by Elie Wiesel. He tells of Jehel, a little boy, who comes running into the room of his grandfather, the famous Rabbi Baruch. Big tears are rolling down his cheeks. And he cries, “My friend has totally given up on me. He is very unfair and very mean to me.” “Well, could you explain this a little more?” asks the Master. “Okay”, responds the little boy. “We were playing hide and seek. I was hiding so well that he could not find me. But then he simply gave up and went home. Isn’t that mean?” The most exciting hiding place has lost its excitement because the other stops playing. The Master caresses the boy’s face. He himself now has tears in his eyes. And he says, “Yes, this is not nice. But look, it is the same way with God. He is in hiding, and we do not seek him. Just imagine! God is hiding, and we people do not even look for him.” In this little story a Christian is able to find the key to the ancient mystery of Christmas. God is in hiding. He waits for his creation to set out toward him, he waits for a new and willing Yes to come about, for love to arise as a new reality out of his creation. He waits for man.

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI: Unpublished homily, December 24,1980

On St. Stephen’s day

Stephen, filled with grace and power, was working great wonders and signs among the people.

Certain members of the so-called Synagogue of Freedmen, Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and people from Cilicia and Asia, came forward and debated with Stephen, but they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke. … When they heard this, they were infuriated, and they ground their teeth at him. But he, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked up intently to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” But they cried out in a loud voice, covered their ears, and rushed upon him together. They threw him out of the city, and began to stone him. The witnesses laid down their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul.  As they were stoning Stephen, he called out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”  (Acts 6:8-10; 7:54-59)