Christmas Novena Begins Today

 

 

 

Novena Prayer

 

Adore, O my soul,

in the bosom of Mary

the only begotten

Son of God

who was made man

for love of you.

 



Advent Season Begins

Feast of St. Andrew
Start of a Christmas Novena

Now that we are well into tripping our way through Mass with the Roman Missal, Third Edition, we can move on. But before we do, why don't yopu take a bit of time to post a comment about how the adjustment to the New Roman Missal is going in your parish or how it feels to you. Just click on the word "comments" below and go for it.

We can now look toward orienting ourselves to the Advent journey. This is the mystery of Mary's "Yes" to the angel Gabriel and Jesus' "Yes" to the desire of the Father that the second person of the Blessed Trinity should become incarnate in human flesh, should enter into our human condition.

Today is the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle and the tradition day to start a Christmas prayer practice. I weas introduced to this as a high school student be the good sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood, NY at Fontbonne Hall Academy. A little card I have saved through the years bears the 1897 imprimatur of Michael Augustine, Archbishop  of New York.

Hail and blessed be the hour and the moment

in which the Son of God was born

of the most pure Virgin Mary,

at midnight, in Bethlehem, in piercing cold.

In that hour vouchsafe, O my God, to hear my prayer

and grant my petition

through the merits of Our Saviour Jesus Christ,

and of His Blessed Mother.

Amen.

This prayer is to be said 15 times a day beginning today and ending on Christmas day. Perfect for the intention dearest to your heart at this time.

For "Little Christmas" Celebrating the Incarnation the 25th of Each Month

In the past attention has been given here to our Redemptoristine custom of focusing on the mystery of the Incarnation every 25th of the month. At Midday Prayer the Prioress offers the scripture reading followed by a reflection for the edification of the community, what we call a "ferverino", something designed to fan the flame in our hearts. Afterward we renew our vows together. Here is this month's reflection.

Poverty
and the Mystery of the Incarnation

by Sister Paula Schmidt, OSsR, Prioress

Peter began to say to him, "We have given up everything and followed you."

Jesus said, "Amen, I say to you,

there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters

or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel

who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age:

houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands,

with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.

But many that are first will be last, and (the) last will be first."

 (Mark 10:28-31) 

The Gospel for today’s Mass, from the Gospel of Mark, follows shortly after the story from yesterday (Mark 10:17-22), in which the wealthy young man asked Jesus how he could become really holy. This guy was doing everything the law required but he wanted to be sure—was there anything more he could do for God? He was sincere, but he wasn’t prepared for Jesus’ answer. Seeing a basically generous heart in him, Jesus was moved to ask for everything.

When the fellow hears the advice of Jesus he just can’t do it. He goes away sad, because ‘he had many possessions’. Or maybe it would be better to say: the many possessions had him. I am sure that Jesus was sad too. St. Mark says that Jesus had looked at the young man and loved him.

Today the scene carries on with Peter saying to Jesus, “We are here, we have given everything”. I wonder if Peter was trying to make Jesus feel better, as if to say, “Look, we are with you. We have given up everything for your sake”.

But then Peter goes on in a way that asks, “What is in it for us now?” Maybe Peter had basically good intentions, gently suggesting that Jesus should also give some motives of encouragement to the next possible recruit that might come along. I suppose that is possible. But as the Synoptic Gospels portray Peter, it is more likely another case where he puts his foot in his mouth. However, the answer Jesus gives is very important for us. We can be grateful to Peter for his question. Jesus’ answer gives us a peek into his heart, into the very heart of God.

Today, as we do every month, we ponder and celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation. I always like to look back on the old custom of keeping the ‘virtue of the month’. In that ancient scheme, the virtue for this month is poverty, the second of the nine virtues given to Celeste [Maria Celeste Crostarosa, our foundress - 1696-1555] in the primitive Rule. Celeste draws her images of this mystery from the writings of St. Paul and St. John. Everything starts in the Trinity, in eternity.

The Incarnation is the movement of God the Word from the riches of the Godhead to the utter poverty of human nature. God goes to an extreme we can never remotely fathom, out of his love and concern for us. Is it fanciful to think that when he describes to Peter and the disciples what we will receive in return for our own total dedication as “a hundred times more” that is exactly the way Jesus sees the worth of what he is doing? We mean something to God, and I believe that in the radical poverty that Jesus asks of us, he want us to rejoice in acknowledging that our brothers and sisters in the human family are as important to us as they are to him; that they are worth all the pain. The community of Jesus is to be our riches.

I guess the question for each of us today is, “Where are my riches?” Are they the things that Jesus truly values? Or does my heart get stuck somehow on my own stuff ? Not material things but opinions, preferences, plans, expectations of others, our ‘druthers’, as Lil Abner would say. Let’s ask our loving Jesus, our brother, lover, and friend, to draw us freely after him, day by day into his mission for his and our world. With all our hearts let us renew our vows trusting in the strength of the Holy Spirit to be the wind under our wings…all the way to the end.

Incarnate As We Are

This is a piece written number of years ago for

presentaion at a retreat for women during

the Advent Season.

Hope it strikes as responsive chord.

When freed to express such things within the understanding company of women of 'a certain age', I have been heard to say (quite frequently of late) "Our bodies betray us." The knowing ‘company of women’ all nod in agreement. They are acknowledging the assault of unwanted weight, the fortyish failure of the eyes, the sag of breast and jowl, the increased frequency of check-ups and medical tests which the magazines advise us to have, not to mention deliberations over drugs for hypertension, high cholesterol, and hormone replacement therapy.

The sense of body as enemy is not limited to older women. Adolescent girls seem to hate their bodies - either too developed or not developed enough - and always too fat. What could it possibly mean that girls and young women are so ready to tattoo, pierce, and in the extreme, mutilate bodies once lavished with adoring parental kisses?

This common feeling of alienation from the body which encases our minds and souls is sadly at odds with the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery which lies at the heart of jubilee celebration at the millennium. As Christians our spiritual jubilee arises from the utter joy of knowing that our God became incarnated, I in fleshed in the very same human body as our own in the person of Jesus. He became our brother in the human fleshy experience. This choice of God is the finally exclamation point added to the words of the creation story - "And God saw that it was very good." God entered into unity with all of creation and particularly the human creation because God so loved the world that Jesus, the Christ, took on human flesh so that all might become fully alive in God.

What interferes with our full appreciation of the wonder of creation and particularly our creation as incarnate beings? What interferes with a healthy, spiritual sense of our nature as soul and body?

Within our church we have inherited the effects of a long-held philosophy of dualism, the split between body and soul, and the resulting conflict between the evil and good that they separately represent. The effects are inherited in the emphasis on sexual sins of birth control, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion. Do you remember from ancient times those teenage questions about petting and how far you could go before ......well you know.

Our culture too has cast the body as enemy. Too fat, too thin, too freckled, to hippy, too bosomy, not bosomy enough. It is difficult news, particularly for women, who from puberty on are uniquely and repeatedly reminded of their bodiliness. As a teenager I found my mother's assurance that my period was my best friend to be of little comfort. And now that they tell me I am peri-menopausal I feel that I am about to mourn that friend. As women, how our bodies work is critical to the survival of the species. Yet the very process of childbearing leaves those scorned tell-tale signs of stretch marks, the ever present belly, and spider veins marring once whistled at legs. On one hand we are idealized, and on the other we are loathed and in the extreme subjected to sexual abuse, battering, and rape. What is a woman to do?

Then, last but not least, comes the aging process, a time when we begin to feel that our bodies are letting us down; menstruation leaving us with the final punch of hot flashes and night sweats, a figure of changing proportions, faces that Joan Rivers tell us to do something about, and the inability to do many things that once were easy. And every bit of it flying in the face of the feminine ideal supported by our culture, a culture which finds it difficult to even imagine us as still sexual. Religious and cultural taboos have rendered female sexuality problematic throughout life, but even more so when women pass the age bearing children.

Yet the bells of jubilee, the bells declaring the entry of the divine into our human bodily milieu, must be calling us to a celebration of both that Incarnation and our own. What would flying in the face of ancient church influence, of culturally engrained negative body images mean for us as women, for our spirituality? What would it mean for our understanding and experience of these mysteries?

"A spirituality that celebrates the great web of connectedness among all created beings shows us how to honor both that earth and our own bodies." Our monthly cycles connect us to the moon and the tides of the earth. We describe our lives as metaphorically resembling the seasons of the year. "Our sense of this connection is fundamental to our sense of the sacred." Realizing we are made of the same stuff of the cosmos we cannot play the old game that separates us from nature and from our own bodies. We know that we are part of a living system, participants in a cosmic dance. Who of us has not experienced a touch of the transcendent when we have stopped and taken the time to allow our body to become a window, a doorway through which we experience the wonder of nature; to sit by the river; to observe a herd of deer graze their way through a meadow; to be transfixed by an awesome star studded night sky is to have an experience of nature that is sacramental.

The Christian dualism mentioned earlier combined with the trust in our time of the mind of man to solve every problem create the shadow under which we try to embrace our bodiliness. The mind has been considered a higher source of knowing reality. "However, the incarnation affirms the value of our bodies. Jesus connects God to the world for all time. Far from separating us from the divine, human bodies engage us in the human adventure in the way God chose to become physically connected to all that is human. In the incarnation the bodily becomes the sacramental bearer of the divine.