In 2006, Pope Francis, then Cardinal Bergoglio, chose a children’s hospital in Palermo (Buenos Aires) to celebrate The Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper. There, he washed the feet of 12 sick children.
His episcopal motto is “miserando atque eligendo” (lowly, yet chosen).
Thank you, Lord, for this man, a true Witness to Hope.
The meditation for today from the Magnificat Advent Companion:
How appropriate that commemoration of the events that lead to the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe begin immediately after the feast of the Immaculate Conception. For Mary, preserved from original sin, knows that the deepest and truest need of our heart is to be loved by God and to experience the unique preference he has for each of us. True obedience flows from our rejoicing over this preference. The serpent lied to Adam and Eve and made them think that the greatest human need is to be as powerful as God. We have sustained this wound, which makes us mistakenly think that to achieve and to impress is more satisfying than simply to be loved, when the merest reflection shows the opposite to be true. We see the interplay between Mary’s sinless clarity and the wound of original sin in her dialogue with Juan Diego, when he complains that he is not accomplished enough to be an emissary to the bishop. Mary reminds him that he is chosen, he has been preferred, and this is all that is necessary; in fact, this is everything. Let us pray to our Lady for our conversion, that our experience may teach us that it is not relying on accomplishments, but rather rejoicing in his love that makes our lives bear the fruit of his presence. (Fr. Richard Veras, emphasis added)
Ponder this:
“Hope does not come from what I do, but from the awareness that there is Someone who loves me with this everlasting love, who calls me into being every instant, having pity on my nothingness.” (Fr. Julian Carron)
“In the eyes of God, we are not, first of all, sinners, who can approach him only with fear and contrite hearts. The basic reality about me is not that I am a sinner, who will be loved only if I fulfill certain requirements. The basic reality of my life is that I am precious in the eyes of God. I am loved by God as though I were an only child. God’s love is not one of his attributes. It is his very essence. Thus, it is unchanging, whether we accept it or not; whether we open our minds and our hearts to it, or not.”
That paragraph is an excerpt from God’s Love: Reason for Hope, a somewhat lengthy article by Fr. William P. Clark, O.M.I. And, if you don’t get a chance to read the entire thing, here are a couple other paragraphs:
“God’s love is unchanging. There is nothing I can do either to reduce, or increase, God’s love. I can only graciously accept it, and find in it the fulfillment of my life. Christ did not wait to offer his love until we changed. It is because he loved us first, that we have the ability to change. In his first letter, John stated that very clearly: “It is not we who have loved God, but God loved us, and sent his Son to expiate our sins” (I John 4: 10).
“God’s love is unconditional. Otherwise, it would not be true love. True love is always unconditional. If I attach conditions to my love, it is not true love. It is, rather, an offering, an exchange, not a gift. In our human relationships, we tend to attach conditions to the love we give. In telling someone we love them, we may be implicitly saying things like this: “I will love you as long as you return my love. I will love you if you meet my expectations of you.” Because that is the way our human condition leads us to act, it is not easy to accept the fact that God’s love is unconditional. Being aware—often, only too painfully—of our brokenness, our failings, and our guilt, we feel unworthy of such unconditional love.”
Jesus’ arm beneath thy head,
Jesus’ love around thee shed,
Jesus’ light to cheer thy way,
Jesus’ ear to hear thee pray,
Jesus’ loving hand to bless
in this weary wilderness.
Jesus first and Jesus last
till earth’s storms are past.
And if aught forgotten be–
may he double it to thee.
~Anonymous
Friday: from the archives
Today is the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross. I like to think of it as the triumph of God’s incredible love for us. Below is a reading by St. Anselm trying to convey how much Christ loved us from the cross:
Jesus is sweet in the bowing of His head and in death, sweet in the stretching out of His arms, sweet in the nailing together of His feet with one nail.
Sweet in the bowing of His head; for bending down His head form the cross He seems to say to His loved one: ‘Oh My beloved, how often hast thou desired to enjoy the kiss of My mouth, declaring to Me through thy comrades, “Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth.” I am ready, I bow My head, I offer My mouth to be kissed as much as thou wilt. And say not…
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Your soul is called to raise itself to God by the elevator of love and not to climb the rough stairway of fear.
I have been meditating on this from St. Thérèse for a number of months now. My problem is that I keep getting off before reaching the top and start climbing the stairs. Then I remember the elevator! How about you?
Picking up again with selections from Fr. Joseph Langford’s, Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire:
“How often, in struggling with our weakness and failures, have we felt alone and ashamed, unworthy of God, tempted to flee from his presence as Adam and Eve after the Fall? After tasting this inner bitterness and pain wrought by our own sin and our own hands, have we not feared being abandoned by Love?”
“[T]he God revealed in Scripture [is] a God whose thirst moves him to reach out to us, to bring us back when we are lost; a God who is always seeking after us, always drawing us to himself.”
“In our darkest moments, in our own dark night of the soul, we all yearn to know that Love has not left us. We long to be assured that God does not flee from our faults, that he does not demand we first scale some moral Olympus before we can win back his favor.”
More from Fr. Langford on the love of God for us:
“The God who delights in us does not do so from a distance. His longing for union with us, draws him to us constantly. God’s thirst draws him closer to us than we can imagine, closer than we are to ourselves.”
“God attends to every breath we take and every movement of our inmost heart with the fullness of his being. His presence to us is never just a portion of himself–as if the billions of people on the planet only had claim to their tiny portion of the Godhead. God is present to each of us with the totality of his being. No part of the Godhead is ever absent, or distracted, from any of us–so much so even ‘the hairs of your head are all numbered’ (Luke 12.7).
“God’s entire being attends to every faintest whisper of our soul–just as a mother who listens in the night for the breathing of her newborn. We each have, as it were, a personal channel connecting us to God, our own individual frequency to which he is tuned day and night. Even when we are not speaking to or thinking of him, God is listening to us.”
Witnesses to Hope 