Meditation of the Day – The Greatest Suffering of Souls in Purgatory
Minute Meditation – The Magnitude of God’s Own Voice
It was not just the message that drew Mary to remember again and again the annunciation of Gabriel. It was his song and movement which were from the unseen heavens where God dwelt with God’s Son who, when he entered her womb, sang his own song and brought his own movement that she could feel as she carried Jesus daily as he grew into the baby born in Bethlehem, looking like all other babies, no glory surrounding him as God’s glory surrounded and shone from the Archangel Gabriel. All the amplitude of Gabriel’s astounding voice and movement was now but a newborn human baby lying in a little crib of ordinary straw. Somewhere inside that little bundle of baby was the magnitude and amplitude of God’s own.
— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM
//Franciscan Media//
Meditation of the Day – The Vow of Chastity is Easily Lost
“The vow of chastity includes purity of body and soul; this is easily lost … This great treasure is deposited in a castle, which has many portals and openings, and if these are not well guarded and defended, the treasure is without security. My daughter, in order to preserve perfectly this vow, it is necessary to make an inviolable pact with thy senses, not to use them, except for what is according to the dictates of reason and for the glory of the Creator. After once the senses are mortified, it will be easy to overcome thy enemies, for only through them can they conquer thee; for no thoughts can recur, or be awakened to activity, unless fomented and excited by the images and impressions admitted through the exterior senses.”— Ven. Mary of Agreda, p. 86
//The Catholic Company//
Minute Meditation – John’s Revelation
John realizes she is not just a tool, a means for God to become human. She is herself a feminine force in the cosmos of his visions, a complementarity whose presence will reveal itself more and more once Mary lies down with her forefathers and foremothers in death. She, like her son, will not die to die; she will die to live forever in the Trinity of Persons who chose her to bear Christ in time. She will merge with the Word and its eternal speaking. She will be God’s eternal choosing of male and female together, willed by the Father, embraced by God’s Spirit, birthing mother of the Son throughout eternity, revealing the humanity of God to humanity. She herself will appear again and again in time. In and out of eternity. She will be the new ark of the covenant, the eternal enfleshing of the Son of God.
— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM
//Franciscan Media//
Meditation of the Day – Make Sure Your Desires Are Not Motivated by Selfishness
Minute Meditation – The Mysterious Faces of God
Here in Ephesus, she was now as she was then: a girl, a woman, waiting and watching for the angel who would announce the word of her passing into the heaven where her Son ruled at the right hand of the Father. She was not afraid. She needed no Gabriel to reassure her. She’d lived too long in the immensity of the mystery to doubt. Nor did she wonder who she would be in eternity. She would be who she always was: Mary, the mother of God’s Son. She suspected that would be her role for all eternity: mother, woman, the completion of the love of the mysterious faces of God—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—the mystery moving through the three of them into her, visible in eternity as it is invisible on earth.
— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM
//Franciscan Media//
Meditation of the Day – The People of God Share in the Royal Office of Christ
Jesus Christ is the one whom the Father anointed with the Holy Spirit and established as priest, prophet, and king. The whole People of God participates in these three offices of Christ and bears the responsibilities for mission and service that flow from them. On entering the People of God through faith and Baptism, one receives a share in this people’s unique, priestly vocation: … The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated to be a spiritual house and a holy priesthood.” “The holy People of God shares also in Christ’s prophetic office,” above all in the supernatural sense of faith that belongs to the whole People, lay and clergy, when it “unfailingly adheres to this faith . . . once for all delivered to the saints,” and when it deepens its understanding and becomes Christ’s witness in the midst of this world. Finally, the People of God shares in the royal office of Christ. He exercises his kingship by drawing all men to himself through his death and Resurrection. Christ, King and Lord of the universe, made himself the servant of all, for he came “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” For the Christian, “to reign is to serve him,” particularly when serving “the poor and the suffering, in whom the Church recognizes the image of her poor and suffering founder.” The People of God fulfills its royal dignity by a life in keeping with its vocation to serve with Christ.—The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 783-786
//The Catholic Company//
Minute Meditation – What Waiting Reveals
How much is revealed about who we really are when we are forced to wait, especially when we’re not sure what we’re waiting for. Is that what Mary was doing—just waiting and praying—when the undreamed of annunciation happened: Gabriel invading her private waiting, announcing that the Lord was with her? She was being told that whoever it was she was waiting for was greater than she imagined and was already there: the Word of God. And Mary says, “Be it done unto me according your word.” So it was for Mary; so it can be for us who wait in silent prayer seemingly unable to do anything to change our circumstances. We can choose to be and let God do. We can choose to let the Holy Spirit work, let the Holy Spirit come upon us that the Word might be born again in and through us. We can be still, and let the Word send down His Spirit.
— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM
//Franciscan Media//
Meditation of the Day – It is Pleasing to Him When We Bear Every Pain and Fatigue for the Salvation of Souls
“Very pleasing to Me, dearest daughter, is the willing desire to bear every pain and fatigue, even unto death, for the salvation of souls, for the more the soul endures, the more she shows that she loves Me; loving Me she comes to know more of My truth, and the more she knows, the more pain and intolerable grief she feels at the offenses committed against me.”— God to St. Catherine of Siena, p. 9
//The Catholic Company//
Minute Meditation – Focus on the Love
Mary would have to remind herself whenever she would remember and start to dwell on Jesus’s suffering, that love redeemed it all, and with the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, she again saw in a flash of light that love was the reason from all eternity. Jesus came to love us and show us the love of the Father and how we are to love the Father. And with that vision, there seemed no past anymore, or even future. Everything was now, everything was new and exciting in the present. And how marvelous to live in that reality that was a preview of what was to come but more importantly, was already here, happening in her. She was living in the kingdom and all that needed to happen was that moment when she entered and saw the kingdom of love that was already there inside and all around her.
— from the book Nourishing Love: A Franciscan Celebration of Mary
by Murray Bodo, OFM
//Franciscan Media//