Saint Bernadette
Category Archives: Spiritual Reflections
Third Week of Easter
Be Joyful Mary Heavenly Queen
Be Joyful Mary . Hymn
Be joyful, Mary, heav’nly Queen,
Be joyful, Mary!/Gaude, Maria!
Your grief is changed to joy serene, Alleluia!
Laetare, O Maria! ( Rejoice, rejoice, O Mary ! )
The Son you bore by heaven’s grace,
Be joyful, Mary!/Gaude, Maria!
Did by his death our guilt erase, Alleluia!
Laetare, O Maria! ( Rejoice, rejoice, O Mary ! )
The Lord has risen from the dead,
Be joyful, Mary!/Gaude, Maria!
He rose in glory as he said, Alleluia!
Laetare, O Maria! ( Rejoice, rejoice, O Mary ! )
One Prayer
Peter is Delivered by an Angel of the Lord
The very night when Herod was about to bring him out, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries before the door were guarding the prison; and behold, an angel of the Lord appeared, and a light shone in the cell; and he struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, “Get up quickly.” And the chains fell off his hands.
And the angel said to him, “Dress yourself and put on your sandals.” And he did so. And he said to him, “Wrap your mantle around you and follow me.” And he went out and followed him; he did not know that what was done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision.
And Peter came to himself, and said, “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.”
When he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying. And when he knocked at the door of the gateway, a maid named Rhoda came to answer. Recognizing Peter’s voice, in her joy she did not open the gate but ran in and told that Peter was standing at the gate. They said to her, “You are mad.” But she insisted that it was so. They said, “It is his angel!”
But Peter continued knocking; and when they opened, they saw him and were amazed. But motioning to them with his hand to be silent, he described to them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. And he said, “Tell this to James and to the brethren.”
Acts of the Apostles
Lo He comes with Clouds Descending
Easter Hymns . VID
Lo! he comes with clouds descending,
once for favored sinners slain;
thousand, thousand saints attending
swell the triumph of his train.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
God appears on earth to reign.
Evry eye shall now behold him,
robed in dreadful majesty;
those who set at naught and sold him,
pierced, and nailed him to the tree,
deeply waning deeply waning
shall the true Messiah see.
Those dear tokens of his Passion
still his dazzling body bears,
cause of endless exultation
to his ransomed worshippers:
with what rapture…with what rapture…
gaze we on those glorious scars!
Yea, amen! let all adore thee,
high on thine eternal throne;
Savior take the power and glory,
claim the kingdom for thine own.
O come quickly, O come quickly;
Alleluia! come, Lord, come.
Amen
O Death, Where is thy sting ?
1 Corinthians 15:54-58
When the perishable puts on the imperishable,
and the mortal puts on immortality,
then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable
always abounding in the work of the Lord,
knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
Second Week of Easter
the Annunciation of the Lord . Solemnity
the Annunciation
The Annunciation heralds the dawn of our salvation. At Mary’s obedient fiat all humanity is wedded to the Divine. The salvation our heart cries out for every day became flesh in the womb of Mary our Mother. We are Christians because of what God announced to Mary : “Hail, full of Grace! the Lord is with you … Do not be afraid Mary, for you have found favor with God” ( Luke 1:26 )
Be it done unto me according to your word the virgin Mary whispers. And at that moment the Eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And this living word embodies the gift of redemption. It will mean for all people in all times unending union with Him and his Father. Eternal Life for all who believe in Jesus Christ our Lord..
Source Magnificat
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The angel awaits an answer; it is time for him to return to God who sent him. We too are waiting, O Lady, for your word of compassion; the sentence of condemnation weighs heavily upon us.
The price of our salvation is offered to you. We shall be set free at once if you consent. In the eternal Word of God we all came to be, and behold, we die. In your brief response we are to be remade in order to be recalled to life.
Tearful Adam with his sorrowing family begs this of you, O loving Virgin, in their exile from Paradise. Abraham begs it, David begs it. All the other holy patriarchs, your ancestors, ask it of you, as they dwell in the country of the shadow of death. This is what the whole earth waits for, prostrate at your feet. It is right in doing so, for on your word depends comfort for the wretched, ransom for the captive, freedom for the condemned, indeed, salvation for all the sons of Adam, the whole of your race.
Answer quickly, O Virgin. Reply in haste to the angel, or rather through the angel to the Lord. Answer with a word, receive the Word of God. Speak your own word, conceive the divine Word. Breathe a passing word, embrace the eternal Word.
Behold the handmaid of the Lord, she says, be it done to me according to your word.
from a homily by St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Solemnity of the Annunciation . Monday
The Annunciation of the Lord . VID
The angel Gabriel from heaven came,
his wings as drifted snow, his eyes as flame;
‘All hail,’ said he, ‘O lowly maiden Mary,’
most highly favoured lady: Gloria!
For now a blessed mother thou shalt be,
all generations laud and honor thee,
thy son shall be Emmanuel, by seers foretold,’
most highly favoured lady: Gloria!
Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head,
‘To me be as it pleaseth God,’ she said,
‘my soul shall laud and magnify His holy name,’
most highly favoured lady: Gloria!
Jesus loves Her more than we do
The Resurrection of the Body
More than the raising of Lazarus ( Part two )
The Greatest Mutation
Pope Benedict XVI tied all this together in an Easter Vigil homily when he called the resurrection “the greatest mutation”:
But somehow the Resurrection is situated so far beyond our horizon, so far outside all our experience that, returning to ourselves, we find ourselves continuing the argument of the disciples: Of what exactly does this ‘rising’ consist? What does it mean for us, for the whole world and the whole of history? A German theologian once said ironically that the miracle of a corpse returning to life – if it really happened, which he did not actually believe – would be ultimately irrelevant precisely because it would not concern us. In fact, if it were simply that somebody was once brought back to life, and no more than that, in what way should this concern us? But the point is that Christ’s Resurrection is something more, something different. If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution, it is the greatest ‘mutation’, absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history. (April 15, 2006)
A glorified body
Pope John Paul II gave a thorough treatment of the resurrection of the body in his Theology of the Body discourses (TOB 64-72), but we will just give a hint of what he says about this experience. I will leave it to the reader to contrast this description of resurrection as a radically new step in life with Lazarus’s experience of merely resuming this earthly life still headed towards his second death. Pope John Paul II described our resurrected life as being perfectly integrated, and “the powers of the spirit will permeate the energies of the body” (TOB 67:2). The “powers of the spirit” refer to things like the intellect and the will and the memory. That these powers will permeate the body means that we will have absolute control over our bodies to the most refined degree–having intelligent fingers, for example or eyes that can make their own choices. Furthermore, because our whole person will be taken up in receiving “God’s most personal self-communication” (TOB 67:5) all of these powers will be oriented towards love. Our bodies will be a perfectly harmonized integration totally open and oriented to receiving God’s love and through Him open to everyone else.
Whatever Lazarus’s experience of life after death was, we can be sure it was not like that. From the experience of the resurrection of the body, there will be no turning back. In the Resurrection of Christ, we have a future that is unimaginably beautiful and therefore a hope that helps us to say with St Paul, “For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him…to know him and the power of his resurrection and [the] sharing of his sufferings by being conformed to his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:8,10-11) And “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us.” (Romans 8:18)