Lent 4th Week Monday. Blessed Columba Marmion, 'We are the sacrifice'

Night Office Readings, 

 I was interested in the yellow bush outside the Church. Fr. M. was able to identify the FORSTHIA, picture.

[Forsythia Bushes - Colourful Shrubs for Border Plantings].  

FOURTH WEEK OF LENT

MONDAY  Year II

First Reading Leviticus 16:1-28

Responsory                  Heb 9:11.12.24

Christ came as the high priest of the good things to come. Not  with the blood of goats or calves, but with his own blood t he entered the holy place once for all, and won our eternal salvation.

Y. He did not enter a holy place fashioned by man: he entered heav­en itself. + He entered the ...

Second Reading 

 From the writings of Blessed Columba Marmion, O.S. B. (Le Christ, vie de l'ame, 337-339)

We are the sacrifice

We are called to be united with Christ in his sacrifice, and with him to offer ourselves. If we are willing, he takes us with him, immolates us with himself and lifts us into the Father's presence as an oblation of fragrant sweetness. It is our very selves that we must offer with Jesus. If the faithful share through baptism in Christ's priesthood, Saint Peter tells us, it is in order that they may offer spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. So true is this that in a prayer between the offertory and consecration the Church refers explicitly to the union between our sacrifice and that of the bridegroom: Lord our God, make these gifts holy, and through them make us a perfect offering to you. 

If we are to be thus accepted by God, we must make our self-offering one with the oblation that Christ made of himself on the cross and renews on the altar. Our Lord substituted himself for us in his sacrifice; he took the place of us all. That is why the blow that fell on him has morally slain us too: If one died for all, then all have died. We shall, however, effectively die with him only by uniting ourselves to his eucharistic sacrifice; and how can we be identified with him in his character as vic­tim? By handing ourselves over, as he did, in unreserved obe­dience to God's good pleasure. 

The victim offered to God must be fully at God's disposal. We must, therefore, live in this basic attitude of giving every­thing, absolutely everything, to God. Out of love, for him we must carry out our acts of renunciation and self-denial, and accept daily sufferings, trials and pain, to such a point that we can say, as Jesus said at the hour of his passion: I act like this so that the world may realize that I love the Father. This is what self­offering with Jesus implies. We give God the most acceptable homage he can receive from us when we offer the divine Son to his eternal Father, and when we offer ourselves with this holy and perfect sacrifice in the same dispositions that filled the sacred heart of Christ on the cross: an intense love for the Father and for our brothers and sisters, a burning desire for

the salvation of all, and a total abandonment to the divine will in all things, especially when it goes against the grain and is hard for us. We find in this the surest means of transformation into Christ, particularly if we unite ourselves to him in communion, which is the most fruitful way of sharing in the sacrifice of the altar. When Christ finds us thus united with him he immolates us with himself, makes us pleasing to his Father and transforms us more and more into his own likeness. 

Responsory Gal 2:19-20

With Christ I have been nailed to the cross, t and I live now no longer my own life, but the life of Christ who lives in me.

V. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave up his life for me. + And I live ... +