3rd Sunday of Lent “Do you wish your prayer to fly toward God? Make for it two wings: fasting and almsgiving” (En. ps. 42, 8).

WDTPRS 3rd Sunday of Lent (2001MR): “Do you wish your prayer to fly toward God?”

Posted on 10 March 2012 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

We can become weary in the midst of our Lenten discipline and the enemy is tirelessly working for our defeat.
In the Ordinary Form Collect for the 3rd Sunday of Lent we beg God to pick us up, and help us stay upright for the rest of the hard Lenten march.  Do not forget the military imagery of exercises and discipline we had in previous weeks.
Deus, omnium misericordiarum et totius bonitatis auctor,
qui peccatorum remedia
in ieiuniis, orationibus et eleemosynis demonstrasti,
hanc humilitatis nostrae confessionem propitius intuere,
ut, qui inclinamur conscientia nostra,
tua semper misericordia sublevemur.
St Augustine (d 430) uses the example of Jesus and woman caught in adultery (John 8) to teach about the mercy of God.  He said in a sermon (as if Jesus were talking): “Those others were restrained by conscience (conscientia) from punishing, mercy moves (inclinat misericordia) me to help you” (s. 13.5).   Even though in the Collect inclino is paired with conscientia rather than misericordia as it is in the sermon, the vocabulary suggests that this sermon may have been a partial inspiration for this ancient Collect, found in the Gelasian Sacramentary.
Misericordia means “mercy”, though its plural refers to works of mercy.  We have both a plural and a singular in today’s prayer.  Inclino is, “to cause to lean” and by extension, “to humble”.  Sublevo literally means “to lift up from beneath, support” and therefore “assist, console”.  Sublevo is in the beautiful 10th century Mozarabic Lenten hymn Attende, Domine:

“Give heed, O Lord, and be merciful, for we have sinned against you.
To you, O high King, Redeemer of all,
we raise up (sublevamus) our eyes weeping:
hear, O Christ, the prayers of those bent down begging.”

Confessio, in the Latin Vulgate (Heb 3:1) and St Gregory the Great (d 604 – ep. 7,5) is “a creed, avowal of belief” in the sense of an acknowledgment of Christ.  For St Augustine confessio has three major meanings: profession of faith in God, praise of God, and admission to God of sins.
Our Collect reminds us of the remedies for sin identified by Jesus Himself: prayer, fasting (cf. Matthew 9:14), and almsgiving or works of mercy (cf Matthew 6:1; Luke 12:33).  When Jesus cures the epileptic demoniac, He says that that sort of demon is driven out only by both prayer and fasting (Mark 9:27 Vulgate).  In Acts 10 an angel tells the centurion Cornelius that his prayers and alms have been seen favorably by God (literally, they ascended as a memorial before God in the manner of a sacrifice).
Augustine said:

“Do you wish your prayer to fly toward God? Make for it two wings: fasting and almsgiving” (En. ps. 42, 8).

Conscientia signifies in the first place, “a knowing of a thing together with another person”.  Note the unity, of knowledge in the prefix con-.  It also means, “conscientiousness” in the sense of knowledge or feelings about a thing.  It also has a moral meaning also as, “a consciousness of right or wrong, the moral sense”.
LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, author of all acts of mercy and all goodness,
who in fasts, prayers, and acts of almsgiving indicated the remedies of sins,
look propitiously on this confession of our humility,
so that we who are being humbled in our conscience
may always be consoled by your mercy.
NEW CORRECTED ICEL (2011):
O God, author of every mercy and of all goodness,
who in fasting, prayer and almsgiving
have shown us a remedy for sin,
look graciously on this confession of our lowliness,
that we, who are bowed down by our conscience,
may always be lifted up by your mercy.
OBSOLETE ICEL (1973):
Father,
you have taught us to overcome our sins
by prayer, fasting and works of mercy.
When we are discouraged by our weakness,
give us confidence in your love.
An examination of conscience is a humbling experience.
We often find through our examen things which frighten and discourage us.  If we are weak in our habits and our faith, that inveterate enemy of ours souls, the Devil, “father of lies”, will rub us raw with our ugliness and tempt us to lose hope about the possibility of living a moral life or, in extreme cases, about our salvation.
On a less dramatic plane, falling down in our Lenten resolve on one day can cause a collapse of our will so that we will “flag” and give up.
This is why the Lenten discipline is so important.
By discipline, sticking to a plan even though it is hard, we learn to govern our appetites, examine our consciences, do penance, and learn the habits which are virtues.
Together with discipline, the recognition of sins and failures will “incline” us to call with humble confidence upon the mercy of Christ who paid the price for our salvation.

A Response:pm125 says:

10 March 2012 at 1:07 pm

Nunraw Abbey - Fr. Gabriel Sherry ocso

Yes, if only … steadfastness is so elusive and when it fails, it seems as though weeping becomes wailing. Weeping v. wailing, i think, makes a difference in the flight of a prayer. Am struck by the words in 
‘Attende, Domine’ above and how they could be sung during the Eighth Station of the Cross when Jesus said to the women of Jerusalem following with the crowd after He fell the second time, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.” (Luke 23:27-28) Sublevamus our eyes weeping reminds us as He did at that Station the way to seek Mercy.

Second Sunday of Lent

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Anne Marie - - - 
To: Donald - - -
Sent: Sunday, 4 March 2012,  
Subject: Second Sunday

Just thinking that I would love to be sitting at the Atlas Martyrs shrine
looking at the hills and reading the Gospel of the Transfiguration. 

Happy Lent.
Anne Marie
Sent from my iPhone

The Transfiguration by Raphael
Interpretation of High Renaissance Biblical Painting

Harmony of the Gospels - The Transfiguration

Mat 17:1-13  The Epileptic Boy 14-22

Mar 9:1-12     . . .13-31

Luke 9:28-36      . . . 37-45

Vatican Museum The Transfiguration Raffaello Sanzio (Urbino 1483 - Rome 1520) The Transfiguration, 1516- 1520 "tempera grassa" on wood Cardinal Giulio de' Medici (the future pope Clement VII) commissioned two paintings for the cathedral of S. Giusto of Narbonne, the city of which he had become bishop in 1515. The Transfiguration was entrusted to Raphael, and the Raising of Lazarus (now in the National Gallery of London) to Sebastiano del Piombo. The Transfiguration was not sent to France because after Raphael's death (1520), the cardinal kept it for himself, subsequently donating it to the church of S. Pietro in Montorio where it was placed over the high altar. In 1797, following the Treaty of Tolentino, this work, like many others, was taken to Paris and returned in 1816, after the fall of Napoleon. It was then that it became part of the Pinacoteca of Pius VII (pontiff from 1800 to 1823). The altarpiece illustrates two episodes narrated in succession in the Gospel according to Matthew: the Transfiguration above, with Christ in glory between the prophets Moses and Elijah, and below, in the foreground, the meeting of the Apostles with the obsessed youth *who will be miraculously cured by Christ on his return from Mount Tabor. This is Raphael's last painting and appears as the spiritual testament of the artist. The work is considered in his biography, written by the famous artist and biographer of the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari, "the most famous, the most beautiful and most divine".

Homily 1st Lent Sundat

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Fr. Raymond . . .
: Sunday, 26 February 2012, 14:19
Subject: DRIVEN BY THE SPIRIT

DRIVEN BY THE SPIRIT  (Mark 1:12 -15)

There are two key words in this short passage about Jesus’ temptation in the desert. The first is the word ‘driven’ and the second is the word ‘forty’.  The word driven is a very strong word: Jesus wasn’t just asked to go into the desert; he wasn’t just inspired, even commanded to go to the desert; he was driven, he was forced to go into the desert. There is something about the word ‘driven’ that implies a reluctance or  a fear on the part of Jesus.  There seems to be here a sort of foreshadowing of the Gethsemani experience for Him here.  We can almost hear the human nature of Jesus crying our here in much the same way as he did in Gethsemani:  ‘No Father, No. Please, No!  Let this ordeal pass from me!’  He had indeed to be ‘driven’ to go into that desert, that fearsome desert.  He was well aware of its significance for his mission.

Another episode in salvation history that’s surely related to this temptation of Jesus is the contrast between it and the temptation of the first Adam.  The first Adam’s temptation took place in a beautiful garden, the garden of paradise, and Adam failed and the paradise was turned into a wilderness, a wilderness of thorns and thistles.  But for Jesus, Our New Adam, his temptation took place, not in a garden, but in a wilderness, this wilderness that Adam’s fall had made of it.  But Jesus didn’t fail us. He triumphed, and his triumph over the tempter was destined to restore that wilderness into a New Garden, a Paradise, a Paradise of Grace.

 Now, if we come to consider the significance of the ‘forty days’.  The number 40 is one of the most significant and frequently occuring numbers in the history of God’s people.  From the 40 days and 40 nights of the deluge to the 40 years of wandering in the desert.  From the 40 days and 40 nights that Moses spent on the mountain receiving the commandments to the 40 days and 40 nights his spies spent reconnoitering the promised land.  And there are many other examples of this occurrence of the number forty in the OT. It seems to express the completion of a certain stage in the life of God’s people or the fullness of some aspect of their history.

The number 40 seems to have some primeval significance for our human nature. This may come from the fact that we spend the first forty weeks of our existence being formed in our Mother’s womb.  It is the very first and most fundamental stage of the existence of each and every one of us.

But to get back to Jesus forty days and forty nights in the desert --- We could well understand this as signifying an experience that should be part and parcel of the lives of each and every one of us.  We are all destined to be confronted by Satan in our own particular lives. We are all destined to be put to the test in difficult circumstances.

And, surely we can understand too from this story how God has compassion for us all in our struggle.  There is a beautiful and very meaningfulconclusion to this story too, a detail that we learn from Matthew’s account of it: there we read that after the temptation ‘the devil left him and angels came to minister to him’.

 And so, surely, we are all promised the comfort and support of God’s angels in our trials.   God is always ready, as the psalmist puts it: to give us joy to balance our afflictions.

 

Lk 11:29-32 “Sign of Jonah” Von Balthasar

Mass

Wednesday of the First Week of Lent

Gospel Lk 11:29-32 “Sign of Jonah”

MEDITATION OF THE DAY

The Sign That Is Given

We cannot look directly at Christ any more than we can look directly at the sun. He has to be "interpreted". His works, words, miracles are one and all signs that point to something: they do not signify only themselves. They possess an unbounded depth into which they attract and invite us. But we do not find the truth behind them, at a second, purely spiri­tual level. .. Rather (and the Fathers affirmed this as well): the Word became Flesh, the eternal Meaning has become incarnate within the temporal symbol. What is signified must be sought within the sign itself, the "moral" within the history, the God within the Man. No one shall ever leave Christ's humanity behind as obsolete instrument ...

"There is no moment, there is no place, there is no circumstance that is not illumined either by the operation or by the suspension of some grace or admirable effect that the humanity of Jesus was intended to bear within itself" (Cardinal Berulle).

FATHER HANS URS VON BALTHASAR  (+1988) was an eminent Swiss Catholic theologian who wrote prodigiously.

MAGNIFICAT Monthly: excerpt from The Grain of the Wheat Aphorisms, Ignatius Press 2007