Saturday, March 31, 2012

As our journey heads into Holy Week, a powerful meditation:

"It is you, my God, my Creator and Redeemer, the scapegoat that for centuries Jerusalem has been laboring to uproot and expel from her bowels! At last she has succeeded in driving it out in a storm of blows and curses! She has gotten rid of Him. Like Judas she has voided herself with a single effort, and she delivers Him to the world with a final scream of childbirth.

Now it is as if the dike of a dam has burst, and the unleashed flood sweeps everything along with it: present, past, and future, the people and prophecies of the Old Testament, pell-mell, the seeds of posterity and the scattered members of the future church, the uprooted obstacle caught in the whirlpool, the vomitings of hate and despair, the invasion of that vast sunken land around us that demands to be filled.

Jesus Christ advances, formidable, amid this tidal wave, and the Virgin follows Him with dry feet. He has brought with Him a torrent, and it rests with Him whether we may moisten our lips or not." - Paul Claudel

(Paul Claudel was a poet, a playwright, a diplomat, and a member of the French Academy - Magnificat, March 31, 2012 Meditation of the Day)

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Hunger Games - Through the help of René Girard

To really get to the heart - the beating, pulsating heart of Hunger Games the movie we have to read René Girard. View this clip from Father Barron and then begin your journey of faith through the Pascal Drama revealing Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.

See this link Battling to the End to begin. 

"Christ took away humanity's sacrificial crutches and left us before a terrible choice: either believe in violence, or not; Christianity is non-belief." - René Girard


Saturday, March 24, 2012

Jesus the Messiah - the intermediary

March 24, 2012 Meditation of the Day from The Magnificat:

Jesus knows himself to be the Messiah, the Anointed One par excellence. He is the king. His realm consists of those human hearts that are devoted to God, of the world that such hearts have transformed. He is the Priest; he lifts to the Father hearts made malleable by love and purged by contrition and fills them with God's grace, that their whole existence may be one great mystery of union. And he does not act by force, but by the prophetic power and truth that is spirit and life (see Jn 4: 24). The figure of the Messiah is immeasurably important. Not the word that he speaks, not the work that he performs, not the instructions that he gives are decisive, but what he himself is. Through him, the living one, heaven addresses earth, and man's will is directed to heaven. In him worlds meet and fuse. There is no immediate relationship based on forgiveness and homecoming between man and the God of Revelation; only via the intermediary runs the road from man to God and from Holiness to us, and he is entirely selfless, living not for himself, but for the honor of his Father and the salvation of his brothers... His very essence is one of sacrifice; how that sacrifice is to be carried out depends on the course of history, which in turn is determined by the inseparably interwoven wills of God and man. The sacrificial act can be realized through simple love - if men will believe; it must be realized through destruction if they do not. Anointment is the mysterious divine act by which the individual is lifted out of daily life and placed at the cross-roads between heaven and earth. This role is so perfectly fulfilled in Christ that all other anointing is only a foreshadowing of his. - from Monsignor Romano Guardini's book, The Lord

Christ calls us beyond ourselves and in truth calls us into himself

Fr. James M. Sullivan, O.P. in Magnificat, "One Feast Day Lost, One Feast Day Found." February 22 is usually the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter which we would be remembering if today was not Ash Wednesday. The Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter "recalls not only the relic of that chair, but more importantly we celebrate the 'Holy Spirit-giving' authority which makes that chair unlike any other" (Magnificat, 309). The authority comes from Christ himself and as Father Sullivan goes on to say, "It is this authority alone that can call us to be freed from our sins, to imagine that this Lent can be different. It is this authority of Christ that gives us hope to live a new life in him, to fine for the first time perhaps our place in this world. It is this authority of Christ to take up a difficult penance knowing that we don't have the strength to do it all ourselves. It is this authority of Christ that calls us beyond ourselves and in truth calls us into himself" (309).


This clip from the movie, "Courageous" gives us a glimpse into living lives in this authority of Christ.