Learning par excellence...

   In quietness and trust is your strength... 

Isaiah 30:15

"I have learned more from prayer 

before the Blessed Sacrament than 

from all the books I have studied." 

St. Thomas Aquinas

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Painting:  Prayer - John Phillip

Love's Choice...

  "Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is.

Love is bound; and the more it is bound

the less it is blind." - G.K. Chesterton

  

Love's Choice

a sonnet for Corpus Christi

 by Malcom Guite

This bread is light, dissolving, almost air,

A little visitation on my tongue,

A wafer-thin sensation, hardly there.

This taste of wine is brief in flavour, flung

A moment to the palate's roof and fled,

Even its aftertaste a memory. 

Yet this is how He comes. Through wine and bread

Love chooses to be emptied into me. 

He does not come in unimagined light

Too bright to be denied, too absolute 

For consciousness, too strong for sight, 

Leaving the seer blind, the poet mute; 

Chooses instead to seep into each sense, 

To dye himself into experience.

_____________

Published in Sounding the Seasons,

a cycle of seventy sonnets for the Church Year.

Photo: Gordonphoto/Shutterstock

In the frenzy of love...

  And so we know and rely on the love

God has for us.  God is love. - I John 4:16

Van Gogh - Starry night

"Consider what is most beautiful

and most noble on earth,

what pleases the mind and the other faculties,

and what delights the flesh and the senses.

Consider the world, and the other worlds that shine

in the night - the whole universe.

Well, this, along with all the satisfied follies of the heart,

is worth nothing, is nothing and less than nothing,

compared with this God of mine! --- of yours!

Infinite treasure, most beautiful pearl; humbled,

become a slave, reduced to the form of a servant in the

stable where He willed to be born, in Joseph's workshop,

in His passion and in His ignominious death;
and in the frenzy of Love --- the blessed Eucharist.

St Josemaría Escrivá

Bishop Luis Zarama

Let us follow her, who follows Him...

 In 1950, Pope Pius XII defined Mary's Assumption into heaven as a dogma of Roman Catholicism: "the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heaven." The proclamation was made in the encyclical Munificentissimus Deus. (Link below for full text) After entering heaven, Mary remains active in the life of the Church.

The Solemnity of the Assumption 
of the Blessed Virgin Mary

August 15

"Today, she who "belongs to Christ" by a unique, abiding, and unrepeatable privilege, the most holy Theotokos and ever-virgin Mary, follows where He has gone, "through the greater and more perfect tent not made by human hands, that is, not of this creation . . . into the Holy Place" (Heb 9:11). Today the sacred and living ark of the living God, who conceived her Creator Himself,  takes up her abode in the temple of God." - St John Damascene

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 Assumpta est Maria in caelum, gaudent angeli, laudantes benedicunt Dominum!

Mary has been taken up into heaven;

the angels rejoice and, praising, bless the Lord!

Painting: Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, artist unknown 

"Above all, let us listen to Mary Most Holy, 

in whom the mystery of the Eucharist appears, 

more than in anyone else, as a mystery of light. 

Gazing upon Mary, we come to know 

the transforming power present in the Eucharist. 

In her we see the world renewed in love. 

Contemplating her, assumed body and soul into heaven, we see 

opening up before us those 'new heavens' and that 'new earth' 

which will appear at the second coming of Christ. 

Here below, the Eucharist represents their pledge, and 

in a certain way, their anticipation: 'Veni, Domine Iesu!'’” 

(Rev 22:20).

St John Paul II,  Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 62

"And now death came; not indeed clothed in mourning and grief, as it does to others, but adorned with light and gladness. But what do we say? Why speak of death? Let us rather say that divine love came, and cut the thread of that noble life. And as a light, before going out, gives a last and brighter flash than ever, so did this beautiful creature, on hearing her Son's invitation to follow him, wrapped in the flames of love, and in the midst of her loving sighs, give a last sigh of still more ardent love, and breathing forth her soul, expired. Thus was that great soul, that beautiful dove of the Lord, loosened from the bands of this life; thus did she enter into the glory of the blessed, where she is now seated, and will be seated, Queen of Paradise, for all eternity." - St Alphonsus de Liguori

Painting: Guido Reni

"The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the oldest Marian Feast, returns every year in the heart of summer. It is an opportunity to rise with Mary to the heights of the spirit where one breathes the pure air of supernatural life and contemplates the most authentic beauty, the beauty of holiness. The atmosphere of today’s celebration is steeped in paschal joy. “Today”, the antiphon of the Magnificat says, “the Virgin Mary was taken up to Heaven. Rejoice, for she reigns with Christ for ever. Alleluia”. This proclamation speaks to us of an event that is utterly unique and extraordinary, yet destined to fill the heart of every human being with hope and happiness.

Mary is indeed the first fruit of the new humanity, the creature in whom the mystery of Christ – his Incarnation, death, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven – has already fully taken effect, redeeming her from death and conveying her, body and soul, to the Kingdom of immortal life.

For this reason, as the Second Vatican Council recalls, the Virgin Mary is a sign of certain hope and comfort to us (cf. Lumen Gentium, n. 68).  Today's feast impels us to lift our gaze to Heaven; not to a heaven consisting of abstract ideas or even an imaginary heaven created by art, but the Heaven of true reality which is God Himself.  God is Heaven.  He is our destination, the destination and the eternal dwelling place from which we come and for which we are striving." 

- Pope Benedict XVI - August 15, 2008 (Homily)

Click here: Apostolic Constitution defining the Dogma of the Assumption - Munificentissimus Deus
Click here: Scott Hahn on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary - YouTube
What is the Assumption of Mary? - YouTube (9:30 mins)

What miracles! ...

Bring joy to your servant, for to you, O Lord, 

I lift up my soul. - Psalm 86:4

 

"You come to me and unite Yourself 

intimately to me under the form of nourishment. 

Your Blood now runs in mine,

Your Soul, Incarnate God, compenetrates mine, 

giving courage and support.

What miracles! 

Who would have ever imagined such!

St Maximilian Kolbe

Poland ~1894-1941

Priest, Martyr

Founder:  Militia of Immaculata
Patron: drug addicts, imprisoned people,
journalists, Pro-life movement

Feast Day - August 14

“When the conquest for the Immaculate of the whole world 

and of every single soul now living or to live until the end of 

the world, and through Her for the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus 

is completed, ... then souls will love the Sacred Heart 

as they have never as yet loved Him, because like Her they will 

have been immersed as never before in the mystery of love: 

the Cross, the Eucharist. Through Her the love of God 

will inflame the world, will set it on fire, and will effect 

the ‘assumption’ of souls,... the divinization 

of the entire world.” - St. Maximilian Kolbe

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"A single act of love makes the soul return to life." 

  St. Maximilian Kolbe
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" For Jesus Christ I am prepared to suffer still more." 

 St. Maximilian Kolbe

Click here: St Maximilian Kolbe - YouTube (8 mins)

St Maximilian, pray for us!

 More on St Maximilian (From Saint of the Day - www.americancatholic.org)

I don’t know what’s going to become of you!” How many parents have said that? Maximilian Mary Kolbe’s reaction was, “I prayed very hard to Our Lady to tell me what would happen to me. She appeared, holding in her hands two crowns, one white, one red. She asked if I would like to have them—one was for purity, the other for martyrdom. I said, ‘I choose both.’ She smiled and disappeared.” After that he was not the same.

He entered the minor seminary of the Conventual Franciscans in Lvív (then Poland, now Ukraine), near his birthplace, and at 16 became a novice. Though he later achieved doctorates in philosophy and theology, he was deeply interested in science, even drawing plans for rocket ships.

Ordained at 24, he saw religious indifference as the deadliest poison of the day. His mission was to combat it. He had already founded the Militia of the Immaculata, whose aim was to fight evil with the witness of the good life, prayer, work and suffering. He dreamed of and then founded Knight of the Immaculata, a  religious magazine under Mary’s protection to preach the Good News to all nations. For the work of publication he established a “City of the Immaculata”—Niepokalanow—which housed 700 of his Franciscan brothers. He later founded one in Nagasaki, Japan. Both the Militia and the magazine ultimately reached the one-million mark in members and  subscribers. His love of God was daily filtered through devotion to Mary.

In 1939 the Nazi panzers overran Poland with deadly speed. Niepokalanow was severely bombed. Kolbe and his friars were arrested, then released in less than three months, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

In 1941 he was arrested again. The Nazis’ purpose was to liquidate the select ones, the leaders. The end came quickly, in Auschwitz three months later, after terrible beatings and humiliations. A prisoner had escaped. The commandant announced that 10 men would die. He relished walking along the ranks. “This one. That one.” As they were being marched away to the starvation bunkers, Number 16670 dared to step from the line. “I would like to take that man’s place. He has a wife and children.” “Who are you?” “A priest.” No name, no mention of fame. Silence.

The commandant, dumbfounded, perhaps with a fleeting thought of history, kicked Sergeant Francis Gajowniczek out of line and ordered Father Kolbe to go with the nine. In the “block of death” they were ordered to strip naked and the slow starvation began in darkness. But there was no screaming—the prisoners sang. By the eve of the Assumption four were left alive. The jailer came to finish Kolbe off as he sat in a corner praying. He lifted his fleshless arm to receive the bite of the  hypodermic needle. It was filled with carbolic acid. They burned his body with all the others. He was beatified in 1971 and canonized in 1982.