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THE BIBLE IN ONE YEAR: https://oneyearbibleonline.com/may-oyb/?version=63&startmmdd=0101
May 9, 2024
(Joh 16:20-22) Amen,
amen, I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall
rejoice: and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be
turned into joy. A woman, when she is in labour, hath sorrow, because
her hour is come; but when she hath brought forth the child, she
remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the
world. So also you now indeed have sorrow: but I will see you again and
your heart shall rejoice. And your joy no man shall take from you.
YOUTUBE: Dead Come Alive - 2024 (Feat. Tyler Joseph) | An Animation
CRISIS MAGAZINE: Heaven Is Only in Heaven
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT: The Ascension: A Source of Lasting Joy
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop: Homily on the Ascension of the Lord
Too often, we look at this world with the attitude and hopes of those
who consider it a place of permanence rather than a passage to the
heavenly goal, while we know that our pilgrimage on this earth has
eternity as its inescapable destination: an eternity of bliss in the
glory of Paradise or an eternity of damnation in the despair of the
flames of Hell. And because of our inclination to believe in an
illusory Hic manebimus optime, we consider the Ascension of Our Lord
almost as an anomalous event, an abandonment on the part of the Savior
who leaves us alone just forty days after His Resurrection.
The flame of the Paschal Candle
that is extinguished after the chanting of the Gospel – signifying
precisely the return of the Incarnate Son to the right hand of the
Father – seems to us, so to speak, in contradiction with what we asked
the divine Majesty a few days ago, through the Rogations: to grant,
preserve and bless the fruits of the earth, to spare us from the
scourge of earthquake, to ward off lightning and storm, pestilence,
famine, and war.
It is difficult – we must admit
this – to be able to pass through a place that we would like to be
happy and prosperous, fertile and generous, serene and free of
conflicts. It is even more difficult when, looking up to the sky, we
often see it furrowed by trails with which evil and ruthless men poison
the air we breathe, pollute fields and springs, rot or dry up crops,
and even go so far as to obscure the sunlight. The inimicus homo does
not only scatter the weeds where the wheat grows: he wants the weeds to
be sown and cultivated, and the wheat to be uprooted and thrown into
the fire; vice to triumph and virtue to be trampled underfoot; death
and sickness to be celebrated, and life – even in the shrine of the
womb or in the innocence of children and the weak – to be struck,
scarred, amputated, and tampered with.
We remain incredulous and shocked
in the face of this subversion, because we do not want to accept the
idea that in addition to the hostile nature that began to exist after
our fall, there has now been added the further snare of homo iniquus et
dolosus, which that nature manipulates, replicates, and imitates
through grotesque artificial surrogates, transgenic foods, and soulless
imitations of Creation, because of the hatred that Satan nurtures
towards the Creator of such gratuitous perfection.
The Lord rises from this valley of
tears, ascends to heaven in jubilatione et in voce tubæ, as if the
angelic hosts were happy to see the Son of God return to his place of
origin, to that eternal and immutable dimension in which the Most Holy
Trinity is the Only Beginning and End of the chosen spirits. But He
ascends to it after He too descended propter nos homines et propter
nostram salutem, becoming incarnate in the virginal womb of Mary Most
Holy, taking on human nature and flesh, facing the Passion and Death on
that Cross which raised Him as Pontifex futurorum bonorum (Heb 9:11),
High Priest of future goods, halfway between earth and heaven, to
create a mystical bridge between us and God. And that humanity assumed
by Our Lord in the Incarnation is borne as the insignia of triumph of
the Victor Rex in the presence of the Eternal Father, and that is why
His Most Holy Body still bears the Wounds of Redemption shining.
This should help us understand two
extremely important concepts. First: the meaning of our earthly life,
which is a pilgrimage to eternity, an exile that we hope with God’s
grace will be temporary, before returning to our true homeland. And
with this conviction, we must also understand that the goods of this
earth – riches, success, power, pleasures – are ballast that we must
get rid of if we are to be able to ascend upwards, to soar as the
biblical eagle flies towards the Divine Sun. Second: the need to
treasure this exile, this pilgrimage in the desert towards the Promised
Land, using the gifts and making fruitful use of the talents that the
Lord has given us, not to make the distance from Heaven more
comfortable and lasting, but to accumulate those spiritual treasures
that neither moth nor rust consume, and that thieves do not break in
and steal (Mt 6:20).
This does not mean despising the
life that Providence has given us, but rather using it for the purpose
it has: the glory of God, to be obtained through our own and others’
sanctification in obedience to His will: fiat voluntas tua – we recite
in the Our Father – sicut in cœlo et in terra, that is, in the
perspective of the eternity that awaits us, and in the temporality of
the passing of days.
Thus, while the divine harmony of
the cosmos marks the days and seasons in which the years of our earthly
life unfold – and for this reason we invoke blessings from Heaven upon
our harvests – in the supernatural order we have the rhythmic cadences
of the Liturgy, which allow us to contemplate the divine Mysteries and
to enjoy a glimpse of that eternity in which the Immaculate Lamb
celebrates the heavenly Liturgy, surrounded by the hosts of Angels and
Saints.
Today our soul is called to look to
the Lord who goes before us to Paradise. Tomorrow, resurrected in our
bodies and led to the Judgment, we will see Him return in glory: Hic
Jesus, qui assumptus est a vobis in cœlum, sic veniet quemadmodum
vidistis eum ascendentem in cœlum (Acts 1:11) – This Jesus, who was
taken up from among you into heaven, will return one day in the same
way as you saw him go into heaven, say the two Angels to the Disciples.
And it will be a return in which time, as we know it, will cease to be
and will enter into divine eternity precisely because the consummatum
est pronounced by the agonizing Savior on the Cross on Good Friday
1,991 years ago will also be valid for the world and for the whole of
humanity, when it has reached the end of trial, exile, and earthly
pilgrimage.
The Paschal Candle represents, as
the Deacon instructs us in the solemn hymn of the Exsultet, the Lumen
Christi, Christ the true Light: as the pillar of fire that preceded the
Jews in crossing the Red Sea, so He also precedes us in our passage
through this world, and in our flight from the wicked who pursue us.
Let us pray that we may be found worthy to reach safety, lest we be
swept away by the waters like Pharaoh’s soldiers. May the Most Holy
Eucharist be our Viaticum, and may the Immaculate Virgin be our Star.
And so may it be.
POPE ST. LEO THE GREAT:
The truth is that the Son of Man was revealed as Son of God in a more
perfect and transcendent way once he had entered into his Father's
glory; he now began to be indescribably more present in his divinity to
those from whom he was further removed in his humanity. A more mature
faith enabled their minds to stretch upward to the Son in his equality
with the Father; it no longer needed contact with Christ's tangible
body, in which as man he is inferior to the Father. For while his
glorified body retained the same nature, the faith of those who
believed in him was now summoned to heights where, as the Father's
equal, the only-begotten Son is reached not by physical handling but by
spiritual discernment.
The
Desert Fathers: sayings of the Early Christian Monks: Discretion
118. A hermit said, 'The cowl we use is the symbol of innocence, the
scapular which covers neck and shoulders is the symbol of a cross, the
girdle, the symbol of courage. Let us live our lives in the virtues
symbolized by our habit. If we do everything sincerely, we shall not
fail.'
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This month's archive can be found at: http://www.catholicprophecy.info/news2.html.