SATURDAY OFFICE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY 31/10/2015

     

24/10/2015

SATURDAY OFFICE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

Optional Reading for the Period between October 7 and Advent

A sermon of Saint Bernard*

"HAIL, full of grace, the Lord is with you" (Lk 1,28). Notice how the angel did not say "the Lord is in you," but "the Lord is with you." For God, who by the simplicity of his essence is equal

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Donald ...
Sent: Saturday, 31 October 2015, 7:33
Subject: Mary Saturday 31 Oct 205

To check Blog.

Sent from my iPad.  

  BLESSED VIRGIN MARY MOTHER OF HOPE

Feast: July 9

Devotion to the most holy Virgin under the title of Mother of Holy Hope has been practiced in the Congregation of the Passion from the beginning.    It was promoted in a special way by the great missionary, Father Thomas Struzzieri, who later became a bishop.  He carried a picture of our Mother of Holy Hope with him on missions. This picture was reproduced and placed in the rooms of our religious so that they might be re­minded to ask our Lady's assistance in their spiritual needs.  The Blessed Virgin thus became the special model and support of our hope, and she remains so. 

                        Mary always shows herself as the Mother of Hope

    One of the titles rightly attributed to the Blessed Virgin Mary is that of Mother of Holy Hope.  Hope is that virtue which anchors the ship of our soul in the stormy sea of this troubled world.  It is a comfort left to us after the fall of Adam, a support in our weakness which encourages us to practice the Christian virtues.   Hope is defined by theologians as a virtue planted in us by God which enables us confidently to expect from God eternal life and the aids that lead to it.  Since Mary possessed this virtue in an heroic degree, she is appropriately called Mother of Holy Hope.

    Instead of looking to worldly patrons, as people generally do, Mary trusted solely in God.  She desired nothing and sought nothing but eternal life and the way to reach it.  The world and all those things that the children of Adam are deceived into admiring and desiring were to her as though not existing.  For her, earth seemed to be a desert, so that even the angels marveled, if one may speak in that way, that she could be so complete a stranger to created things.  They seemed to say: "Who is this coming up from the desert, leaning upon her lover?"

    Although endowed with extraordinary graces and unstained by original sin, Mary never counted on any resource of her own.  Rather, she knew that God is the author of every good thing and the source of all perfection. She confided in him amid the dangers of persecution while she was a fugitive from her own country.  She hoped in him even when she saw her divine Son die on the cross and the apostles dispersed, and she hoped in him when enemies turned on the infant Church, the loving bride of her divine Son.  Supported by this confidence, she remained firm in the midst of what seemed like disaster, and strengthened those who, in their discouragement and need, turned to her as to a mother.  She encouraged the weak, lifted up those who had fallen and urged the strong to ever greater trust.

    We must not think that Mary has resigned from such maternal service in our day. Certainly not!  Even now, from that exalted throne where she reigns in glory, Mary reaches out a mother's hand to those who have failed.  She graciously appears to them in the ways, and meets them with all solicitude, comforting them and giving them courage.  She heartens the good, praying that they may be fearless and unconquerable in the adversities of life.  She inspires pastors and inflames with love the flock they shepherd for Christ.   In a word, she never ceases to exercise her role as Mother of Holy Hope.

                     From the Mariology of Blessed Dominic of the Mother of. God, C.P.  Priest

      Read More: What is Mary's Hope?     

   http://www.passionistnuns.org/meditation/MCMShuhmann/index.htm 

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BCC

• nunrawdonald@yahoo.com
 
• williamwardle2bp@btinternet.com
 
• Bob Sweeney

Night Office Saturday Mary
  
Sent from my iPad.   

   

CHAPTER SIX. From Jean Danielou.

HOPE

OF all the psychological attitudes described in the Bible, none is more intimately characteristic of the Christian's active role in sacred history than the quality of hope, which may indeed be called the specific virtue of life in the time-process. On the foundation of the past, hope looks forward to the future in the experience of the present moment: these are the constitutive aspects of its definition. Its whole basis is in elapsed events, the actual promises of God and the beginnings of their fulfilment. Its movement is wholly towards futurity, in the expectation of the kingdom of God, whose establishment is to be the culmination of history. Here and now it is nothing but a faithful patience undismayed by trouble and difficulty, the very character of a spiritual man. 

Hope does not mean optimism. Optimism is easy: it consists in supposing that everything i s s ure to work out in the end, automatically. In a more analytical form, its conception of evil is of a certain transitional dislocation or disturbance, which will rectify itself, as it were a growing-pain. By this elimination of all that is tragic from the problem of evil, optimism would destroy the very nature of hope. To delude men into thinking that the remedy for human ills is in their own hands is actually to put them out of the way of salvation. One example of this fallacious optimism is the Marxist dogma that a change in the economic conditions of life suffices to transform mankind. But even apart from materialism, the same dangerous illusion recurs in other systems, for instance when the mere act of withdrawal from the world of the senses is proposed as the way for mankind to find itself and attain to the Absolute. 

Pessimistic doctrines, by comparison, seem far more sensible, for at least they take some account of the tragic element in the life of mankind: and this i s something that can hardly be denied in the contemporary world, with all its injustice and cruelty, and with the observable incidence of suffering and death. The merest intellectual probity demands that we should face these facts, even though (or because) it takes more courage to do so than to indulge in illusory fantasies. Besides, it is of the essence of pessimism to recognize the fact of man's inability to improve his own lot; in this respect, those who have seen furthest into human nature are all pessimists, like Angustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard; and Péguy graduated from an optimistic socialism towards the despairing position represented by the second Jeanne d'Arc. The attitude of despair is a precondition of hope; for the first act of hope is a cry for help, which springs from the awareness of a desperate situation.   ......