Guardian Angels, St. Bernard 'That they might guard you in all your ways'

Community Liturgy Office - drawings

We thank iBreviary for the St. Bernard illuminations on our Guardian Angels.

      

iBreviary

Friday, 2 October 2015

Friday of the Twenty-Sixth Week in Ordinary Time

Type: Weekday - Time: Ordinary

Office of Readings

SECOND READING

From a sermon by Saint Bernard, abbot
(Sermo 12 in psalmum Qui habitat, 3. 6-8: Opera omnia, Edit. Cisterc. 4 [1966], 458-462)

That they might guard you in all your ways

He has given his angels charge over you to guard you in all your ways. Let them thank the Lord for his mercy; his wonderful works are for the children of men. Let them give thanks and say among the nations, the Lord has done great things for them. O Lord, what is man that you have made yourself known to him, or why do you incline your heart to him? And you do incline your heart to him; you show him your care and your concern. Finally, you send your only Son and the grace of your Spirit, and promise him a vision of your countenance. And so, that nothing in heaven should be wanting in your concern for us, you send those blessed spirits to serve us, assigning them as our guardians and our teachers.

He has given his angels charge over you to guard you in all your ways. These words should fill you with respect, inspire devotion and instill confidence; respect for the presence of angels, devotion because of their loving service, and confidence because of their protection. And so the angels are here; they are at your side, they are with you, present on your behalf. They are here to protect you and to serve you. But even if it is God who has given them this charge, we must nonetheless be grateful to them for the great love with which they obey and come to help us in our great need.

So let us be devoted and grateful to such great protectors; let us return their love and honor them as much as we can and should. Yet all our love and honor must go to him, for it is from him that they receive all that makes them worthy of our love and respect.

We should then, my brothers, show our affection for the angels, for one day they will be our co-heirs just as here below they are our guardians and trustees appointed and set over us by the Father. We are God’s children although it does not seem so, because we are still but small children under guardians and trustees, and for the present little better than slaves.

Even though we are children and have a long, a very long and dangerous way to go, with such protectors what have we to fear? They who keep us in all our ways cannot be overpowered or led astray, much less lead us astray. They are loyal, prudent, powerful. Why then are we afraid? We have only to follow them, stay close to them, and we shall dwell under the protection of God’s heaven.
RESPONSORY
Psalm 91:11-12, 10

God gave his angels charge over you
to protect you in all your ways.
– They shall lift you up with their hands,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.

No evil shall harm you,
no plague shall come near your tent.
– They shall lift you up with their hands,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.

CONCLUDING PRAYER

Let us pray.

God, our Father,
in your loving providence
you send your holy angels to watch over us.
Hear our prayers, defend us always by their protection
and let us share your life with them for ever.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
– Amen.

Lent 4th Week, From the writings of Henri de Lubac, SJ

Vigil Lectionary Readings, 

Lent II Fourth Week Thursday.

Thursday

First Reading        Numbers 3:1-13: 8:5-11.

Responsory          Heb 10:22-23; Mk 16:16

With our hearts cleansed and freed from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with clean water, let us stand firm in the profession of our hope, + for he who made the promise is faithful.

V Everyone who believes and is baptized will be saved. +For he who ...

         

Alternative Reading

From the writings of Henri de Lubac, SJ (Catholicisme, 206-207)

The thoughts of a Christian way follow various attractions, but they are always drawn back, as by the force of gravity, to the contemplation of the cross. The whole mystery of Christ is at once a mystery of resurrection and a mystery of death. Neither is complete without the other, and one word express­es both: the paschal mystery, that is to say, the Passover. It is the transmutation of the whole being implying a total separa­tion from self which no one can hope to escape. The individ­ual must renounce all natural values insofar as they are pure­ly natural, even those which have made it possible to rise above one's personal limitations.

However authentic and pure the vision of unity that inspires and directs a person's activity, before it can become a reality it must be eclipsed. The mighty shadow of the cross must envelop it. Humanity must cease to regard itself as its own final end if it is to become one, for God is essentially a God who admits of no sharing, a God who must be loved without rival or not at all.

Nor is it possible to pass effortlessly from a natural to a supernatural love. To lose oneself is the condition for finding oneself. The rigor of this spiritual logic applies to humanity as a whole as well as to the individual, to my love of the human family and of particular people as well as to my self-love. The law of exodus is the law of ecstasy. We cannot avoid being part of the human race, but the human race as a whole must die to itself in everyone of its members, so as to live trans­formed in God. The only perfect fellowship is a fellowship united in a common adoration. "The glory of God is a human being fully alive," but only by giving all the glory to God can the individual have access to life in total solidarity with others; in no other way can society be complete. Such is the uni­versal Passover which lays the foundations of the city of God.

Christ sustains the whole of humanity in his own person.

Through his death on the cross that humanity renounces self­love and dies. But the mystery is deeper yet. He who bore all within himself was abandoned by all; the universal Man died alone. Such was the climax of the kenosis and the completion of the sacrifice. This abandonment, even to apparent deser­tion by the Father, was necessary to effect reunion, Here we have the mystery of loneliness, of rending apart, becoming the one efficacious sign of gathering together into unity; a sacred sword reaching to the separation of soul and spirit only so that universal life may flow in.

“O you who are alone among the lonely, you who are all in all!”

To conclude in the words of Saint Irenaeus: "Through the wood of the cross the work of God's Word has become manifest to all; his arms are there extended to gather the whole human race together – two hands outstretched, since there are two peoples scattered over the whole earth. And because there is one only God above all and through all and in all, we see in the centre of the cross one single head."

Responsory          Jn 4:23-24

Those who worship the Father must worship him in spirit and in truth. + The Father seeks such worshipers as these.

v. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. + The Father seeks ...

Vigil Lectionary Readings, Second Week in Ordinary Time Year 2

A reading from the book of Genesis.
And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.   

Year B: Second Week of Ordinary Time SUNDAY

First ReadingGenesis 9:1-17

Cardinal Jean Danielou S.J.

Second Reading
Jean Cardinal Daniélou, Holy Pagans of the Old Testament, 78-80.83; Word in Season VII

A reading from Holy Pagans of the Old Testament by Jean Cardinal Daniélou. 

The fidelity of the living God

It is in connection with Noah that the momentous notion of a covenant appears for the first time in holy Scripture. The covenant is one of the essential characteristics, the most characteristic quality perhaps, of the God of the Bible. It signifies that God communicates certain good things to mankind and that this is in the nature of an irrevocable settlement. Thus it allows us to depend upon these benefits, not in virtue of any right we have to them but by reason of God’s fidelity to his word.

The covenant made with Noah is connected with the cosmic religion and bears essentially upon God's fidelity in the order of the world. It is first of all a question of a covenant not with a particular people but with humanity as a whole and even with the whole cosmos. By this covenant God pledges himself not to de­stroy life upon the earth, whatever may be the sins of the human race. God’s fidelity will be expressed particularly in the regularity of the laws of the cosmos, in the recurrent seasons: All the days of the earth seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, night and day, shall not cease. This text is of prime importance. It establishes the right to see in the recurrent seasons the revelation of the fidelity of the living God. And this revelation, says Saint Paul, is given to all people among whom God has not left himself without testimony, giving them rain and fruitful seasons. This revelation constitutes the authentic basis of the pagan religions for which the recurrent seasons are the foundations of their worship.

By this covenant, God gives, as it were, an official document which bears witness to his pledge for all the generations to come. This document is the rainbow: as the paschal lamb is to be the memorial of the Mosaic covenant, as the holy Eucharist is the sacrament of the new eternal covenant replacing the ancient, so the rainbow is the memorial and sacred sign of the cosmic covenant which persists throughout the establishment of new and more perfect covenants.

The order of the world is no longer at the mercy of human sin. In the economy now beginning God will give temporal goods to sinners as well as to saints. The God of the covenant is not a God who will rain upon the just and will refuse rain to the unjust, but, in line with the very words of Christ, he makes the sun to rise upon the good and bad, and rains upon the just and unjust.

By the covenant with Noah a break is made in the connection between sin and punishment whereby salvation can be brought in. Thus the covenant is a manifestation of love. It reveals something new about God, for it is the first manifestation of redemptive love, while the former divine economy showed only creative love. What now appears is that long-suffering mercy with which God endures in order to save the sinner.

Jean Cardinal Daniélou, Holy Pagans of the Old Testament, 78-80.83; Word in Season VII. 1999

Another Link: Vigil Lectionary Readings
http://www.forwardministryonline.com/articlesnews/vigilslectionaryreadings/Bordinarytime021.html
Index
http://www.forwardministryonline.com/articlesnews/vigilslectionaryreadings/  
In the Word in Season (1999) there are 16 references of Jean Danielou