What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
- Thomas Merton
(How is knowledge of God related to your own self-knowledge?)
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- Feast of the Immaculate Conception
GN 3:9-15, 20; PS 98:1, 2-3AB, 3CD-4; EPH 1:3-6, 11-12
LK 1:26-38
The angel Gabriel was sent from God
to a town of Galilee called Nazareth,
to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph,
of the house of David,
and the virgin’s name was Mary.
And coming to her, he said,
“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.”
But she was greatly troubled at what was said
and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.
Then the angel said to her,
“Do not be afraid, Mary,
for you have found favor with God.
Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall name him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High,
and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father,
and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever,
and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”
But Mary said to the angel,
“How can this be,
since I have no relations with a man?”
And the angel said to her in reply,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.
And behold, Elizabeth, your relative,
has also conceived a son in her old age,
and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren;
for nothing will be impossible for God.”
Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
May it be done to me according to your word.”
Then the angel departed from her.
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Reflection on the Scriptures |
The Creator, whom Mary’s son, Jesus, taught us to address as “Father,” was at work in Joachim and Ann, the traditional names for her parents, raising her to live with a heart utterly open to God and fellow human beings within the Jewish traditions of the day. How do we know this? By coming to know the son whom she mothered. That process illustrated what St. Paul taught us to call grace, which Paul himself
experienced, years later, when he was surprised by Jesus, amid his search and destroy mission to root out the spread of his disciples. You might say that the Catholic Church recognized this divine intervention in the “sense of the faithful” ultimately in the declaration of Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The reasoning was that the young woman who was so full of grace as a identify as a “slave girl of God” in response to the divine interruption that called her out of a simple
quiet life into the center of history, such a person must have been exempt from original sin even from her own birth from Ann’s womb.
Pope Francis is so convinced of Mary as the ultimate model of any disciple of Christ that he reflects and prays about that reality every chance he gets. For example, recently in a homily urging his audience of visitors to preach the gospel by their deeds of charity and justice as well as by their words, he also urged them to model their own lives on Mary’s readiness to serve others in a ministry of
mercy.
The entrance of the divine into human history in Jesus of Nazareth came to be called incarnation, literally enfleshment. I am beginning to realize that this enfleshment is a process that entails a history (e.g. Joachim and Ann) and, even more importantly, a promise that is still unfolding—in our own lives, if we have chosen to join it.
- by Dennis Hamm, S.J.
How to Pray
- by Reuben Archer Torrey
Chapter 1: The Importance of Prayer
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but people whom the Holy Ghost can use--people of prayer, mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through people. He does not come on machinery, but on people. He does not anoint plans, but people -- people of prayer.
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