Since we are travellers and pilgrims in the world, let us ever ponder on the end of the road, that is of our life, for the end of our roadway is our home (St Columban, 8th sermon).
Showing posts with label Sorrowful Mysteries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sorrowful Mysteries. Show all posts
The Rosary belongs among the finest and most praiseworthy traditions of Christian contemplation. Developed in the West, it is a typically meditative prayer, corresponding in some way to the “prayer of the heart” or “Jesus prayer” which took root in the soil of the Christian East.' [St John Paul II,Rosarium Virginis Mariae, No 5.]
The Rosary here is the formula prayed by members of the Legion of Mary, the way I prefer. There are various ways of beginning and ending the Rosary but the Five Mysteries are the heart of the prayer.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Come, O Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of Your love.
v. Send forth Your Spirit, O Lord, and they shall be created.
R. And You shall renew the face of the earth.
Let us pray.
God our Father, pour out the gifts of Your Holy Spirit on the world. You sent the Spirit on Your Church to begin the teaching of the gospel: now let the Spirit continue to work in the world through the hearts of all who believe. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy; hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To you we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to you we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, O most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy towards us, and after this our exile, show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
v. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
Let us pray.
O God, Whose only-begotten Son, by His life, death and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal salvation; grant, we beseech You, that meditating upon these mysteries in the most holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain, and obtain what they promise. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.
v. Most Sacred Heart of Jesus R. Have mercy on us. v. Immaculate Heart of Mary R. Pray for us. v. St Joseph R. Pray for us. v. St John the Evangelist R. Pray for us.
v. St Louis-Marie deMontfort R. Pray for us. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Ave Regina Caelorum
Sung by the Benedictine Monks of the Abbey at Ganagobie.
Ave Regina Caelorum is one of four seasonal Marian anthems sung or recited at the end of Compline (Night Prayer) in the Divine Office (Liturgy of the Hours, Breviary). This anthem is sung from after Purification (February 2 or Candlemas) until the Easter Vigil.
Readings(Jerusalem Bible: Australia,
England & Wales, India [optional], Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan,
Scotland, South Africa)
First ReadingIsaiah 52:13 – 53:12 (New Revised
Standard Version, Anglicised Catholic Edition, Canada)
See,
my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Just as there were many who were astonished at him —so marred was his appearance,
beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals— so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths
because of him; for
that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard
they shall contemplate. Who
has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he
had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we
should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and
acquainted with infirmity; and
as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of
no account.
Surely
he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet
we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon
him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and
the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He
was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like
a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its
shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For
he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of
my people. They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although
he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his
mouth.
Yet
it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When
you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and
shall prolong his days; through
him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
Out
of his anguish he shall see light; he
shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant,
shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with
the strong; because
he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the
transgressors; yet
he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the
transgressors.
This is the talk givenby Pope Benedict XVI after the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum on Good
Friday, 22 April 2011. I have highlighted
some parts of his message.
Dear Brothers and
Sisters, This evening, in faith,
we have accompanied Jesus as he takes the final steps of his earthly journey,
the most painful steps, the steps that lead to Calvary. We have heard the cries
of the crowd, the words of condemnation, the insults of the soldiers, the
lamentation of the Virgin Mary and of the women. Now we are immersed in the
silence of this night, in the silence of the cross, the silence of death. It is
a silence pregnant with the burden of pain borne by a man rejected, oppressed,
downtrodden, the burden of sin which mars his face, the burden of evil. Tonight we have re-lived, deep within our
hearts, the drama of Jesus, weighed down by pain, by evil, by human sin.
What remains now before
our eyes? It is a crucified man, a cross raised on Golgotha, a cross which
seems a sign of the final defeat of the One who brought light to those immersed
in darkness, the One who spoke of the power of forgiveness and of mercy, the
One who asked us to believe in God’s infinite love for each human person.
Despised and rejected by men, there stands before us ‘a man of suffering and
acquainted with infirmity, one from whom others hide their faces’ (Is 53:3).
But let us look more
closely at that man crucified between earth and heaven. Let us contemplate him more intently, and we will realize that the
cross is not the banner of the victory of death, sin and evil, but rather the
luminous sign of love, of God’s immense love, of something that we could never
have asked, imagined or expected: God bent down over us, he lowered himself,
even to the darkest corner of our lives, in order to stretch out his hand and
draw us to himself, to bring us all the way to himself. The cross speaks to
us of the supreme love of God and invites, today, to renew our faith in the
power of that love, and to believe that in every situation of our lives, our
history and our world, God is able to vanquish death, sin and evil, and to give
us new, risen life. In the Son of God’s
death on the cross, we find the seed of new hope for life, like the seed which
dies within the earth.
This night full of
silence, full of hope, echoes God’s call to us as found in the words of Saint
Augustine: ‘Have faith! You will come to me and you will taste the good things
of my table, even as I did not disdain to taste the evil things of your
table... I have promised you my own life. As a pledge of this, I have given you
my death, as if to say: Look! I am inviting you to share in my life. It is a
life where no one dies, a life which is truly blessed, which offers an
incorruptible food, the food which refreshes and never fails. The goal to which I invite you … is
friendship with the Father and the Holy Spirit, it is the eternal supper, it is
communion with me … It is a share in my own life’ (cf. Sermo 231,
5).
Let us gaze on the
crucified Jesus, and let us ask in prayer: Enlighten our hearts, Lord, that we
may follow you along the way of the cross. Put to death in us the ‘old man’
bound by selfishness, evil and sin. Make
us ‘new men’, men and women of holiness, transformed and enlivened by your love.
I'm preparing this on Wednesday of Holy Week. Just today The Catholic Thing website carries an article by Randall Smith, It's Part of the Deal, Isn't It?that provides food for reflection and prayer at this time, especially on Good Friday. He asks his students to reflect on the choices made by the Trappist monks in Tibhirine, Algeria, who were martyred in 1996, and by the villagers of Le Chambon, France, who protected many Jews during World War II.
Recently, students in our Honors class were
reading The Rule of St. Benedict. I
then had them watch the 2010 film Of Gods
and Men about the Trappist monastery in Tibhirine, Algeria, where nine
French monks lived and worked until 1996 when, during the Algerian Civil War,
seven of them were kidnapped by the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria and later
found beheaded.
I won’t go into why I pair the movie with
the book, other than to say that the movie does a nice job of portraying the
Benedictine life, both its challenges and its understated beauties.Seeing it portrayed in this way helps make
the Rule seem less alien.Rather than asking, “What kind of bizarre
person would choose to live this way?” they see it as something more desirable,
something worth choosing.
One of the additional questions the movie
poses for us, however, is whether the monks made the right decision to stay in
Algeria when the violence in their area increased and mortal danger became more
threatening.The movie does a good job
of showing how conflicted the monks were.They were far from determined to embrace martyrdom and rush to their
deaths.At one meeting, a monk says
point-blank:“I didn’t become a monk to
die.”
