Month: December 2020

“Whoever has ears ought to hear.”

What aren’t we hearing, then? So often we miss the memo, miss the message – whether from the Lord or from others in our own life. Why? Maybe it’s from sheer inattentiveness, maybe it’s a product of our own stubbornness or maybe it’s an unwillingness to listen.

All of these present obstacles to living our Christian life, as the Lord never stops speaking to us. It is we who don’t pay attention. It is we who believe that we can live a good, holy, moral life all on our own, without any assistance. It is we who choose to stop listening to Him. Yet, despite all of our shortcomings, God never stops pursuing us!

The Lord is trying to tell us so much in this First Reading from Isaiah, if only we can open our ears and open our hearts.

Here, his message is simple. “I will help you.” Isaiah then paints a vivid picture to describe how the Lord helps, using a very interesting choice of words. Jacob is described as a worm and Israel as a maggot. Worms and maggots can’t do much on their own. Any usefulness is dependent upon the worm or maggot being acted upon by someone or something outside of itself. For example, birds will eat worms for food but the bird must first be hungry. The worm can’t do anything on its own to feed the bird.

There isn’t much to a worm or a maggot but that doesn’t stop the Lord. With His help, Israel can then become a “threshing sledge, sharp, new and double-edged.” With the Lord’s help, Israel can thresh the mountain, make the hills like chaff and winnow them away. From being as lowly as a worm to being powerful enough to act upon nature – that’s what the Lord’s help can do.

What help can He offer us, then? Almost anything that we can imagine, we can call upon the Lord for His help. Nothing is too big and nothing is too small for Him. In fact, God waits for his beloved sons and daughters to ask for His help, much like we would go to our own earthly fathers for a solution to our problems.

The Lord is ever ready to lend a hand to His people. May we not be too proud to extend our own hand to Him and accept what He offers.

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“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Today’s First Reading is very short—so short it could be easy to dismiss or overlook. This would be unfortunate because it has much to do with all of your problems going away. God is aware of everything. He’s God. While you and I know this, sometimes we don’t believe it. There are moments when God seems disconnected, like we’re a cake in the oven and he forgot to come back and check on us. There are moments or even years of our lives when we feel like we’re on an island and nothing is going right and there is no relief from our struggles.

Big or small, we all have burdens. It could be waking up one morning to find your car won’t start. For some people it’s learning that a loved one has cancer. Anything that steals our peace is a burden. I’m sure plenty of people were burdened by this 2020 election season. Because of original sin, burdens happen. It’s a part of being human.

Satan wants us to feel isolated and abandoned. He wants us to get swept away by our problems and consumed by despair and hopelessness. He wants us to blame God for our burdens.

But here’s the wonderful news: God allows our burdens as an opportunity to approach him. A burden is an invitation to Trust in Him. When God became man and experienced suffering, he took on the ultimate burden: the weight of our sins and the sins of all of humanity.

The Mercy of our God is not comprehendible. He loves us so much. God wants our burdens. When we stop fighting to do it ourselves, that’s when God takes over. This doesn’t mean our problems magically go away as soon as we enter a Church. It means that as we begin to deepen our relationship with Christ and truly approach him, the weight of our own crosses begins to seem insignificant. “Jesus, I trust in You.”

Trust in God’s love and mercy.
Realize each burden is an opportunity to deepen your Trust in Jesus.
Understand even the smallest struggle can be given to God.
Make a Morning Offering each day as a reminder to give God everything.
Pray for the Grace to submit to God’s Divine Will.

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Eve and Mary were similar in a lot of ways. They were both created without sin. They were both daughters of covenants, under which they pledged obedience. They were both visited by a supernatural being.

It is easy to look at Eve and think that original sin and the fall were all her fault. After all, she is the one who listened to the serpent and took the bite of the forbidden fruit. She is the one who convinced Adam to try it, too. Curse her womanly wiles. However, we fail to realize that nowhere in Scripture does it say that the serpent cornered Eve alone. We tend to think that he lured her away somehow to get her away from Adam’s protection in order to tempt her. But if we look at the Genesis account, it actually reads, “She took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”

Therefore, we see that the serpent truly was the most cunning of all the creatures. He targeted Eve, and Adam was right there. Yet he did nothing to dissuade her or protect her vulnerability.

Which brings us to Mary, a lowly handmaiden from small-town Nazareth. She did nothing to draw attention to herself, and yet now she alone is revered as Queen of Heaven and Earth.

Eve said no to God’s plan, but Mary said yes. She said yes to the disgrace that would ensue as news of an unmarried, pregnant teen got out. She said yes to giving up her body as a vessel for the Son of God. She said yes to raising that boy, and then letting Him leave to fulfill His earthly mission. She said yes to what she could not yet know – that she would one day have to watch her baby boy die a horrendous death on a Cross in front of mockers and evildoers.

If you have never gotten the chance, I HIGHLY recommend that you read Pope St. John Paul II’s Letter to Women. It is a reflection on womanhood and the feminine genius that is unparalleled.

“The Church sees in Mary the highest expression of the “feminine genius” and she finds in her a source of constant inspiration. Mary called herself the “handmaid of the Lord” (Lk 1:38). Through obedience to the Word of God she accepted her lofty yet not easy vocation as wife and mother in the family of Nazareth. Putting herself at God’s service, she also put herself at the service of others: a service of love. Precisely through this service Mary was able to experience in her life a mysterious, but authentic “reign”. It is not by chance that she is invoked as “Queen of heaven and earth”. The entire community of believers thus invokes her; many nations and peoples call upon her as their “Queen”. For her, “to reign” is to serve! Her service is “to reign”!

Why did Satan target the woman in the Garden? Because he knows that women are special. He knows that women are powerful. We alone have the ability to carry and sustain life in our own bodies. But he did not know that one day a woman would change the course of history.

“Necessary emphasis should be placed on the ‘genius of women’, not only by considering great and famous women of the past or present, but also those ordinary women who reveal the gift of their womanhood by placing themselves at the service of others in their everyday lives. For in giving themselves to others each day women fulfill their deepest vocation. Perhaps more than men, women acknowledge the person, because they see persons with their hearts. They see them independently of various ideological or political systems. They see others in their greatness and limitations; they try to go out to them and help them. In this way the basic plan of the Creator takes flesh in the history of humanity and there is constantly revealed, in the variety of vocations, that beauty – not merely physical, but above all spiritual – which God bestowed from the very beginning on all, and in a particular way on women.” (JP II, Letter to Women).

That, my friends, is feminism at its truest and purest self.

That is what we celebrate today. That our God inserted Himself into our human history by taking on the lowliness of our flesh and bones, for our sake. That He chose a woman as His vessel. That He pre-redeemed her from the moment of her conception in Anne’s womb, by grace of His sacrifice on Calvary. That He ordained her as the ultimate example of femininity, beauty, purity, grace, and surrender.

This is why we elevate Mary to the highest place of all the Saints: not because of anything she did on her own, but because the level of intimacy that she had with our God was so pure that it, by default, made her immaculate.

So, in conclusion, Mary and Eve are very similar. But they also differ at a fundamental level.

Eve’s name means the “mother of all living”, because from her descended the human race. At the foot of the Cross, Mary became the “mother of all who truly live” when Jesus gave His mother to the Church.

Eve’s disobedience resulted in the fall into sin of the entire human race. The result was death – physically and spiritually. Mary’s obedience to God resulted in Christ’s redemption of the entire human race. The result was eternal life.

Thus, the Church Fathers confidently say, “The knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience: what the virgin Eve bound through her disbelief, Mary loosened by her faith. Death through Eve, life through Mary.”

Ultimately, Eve said no. But Mary said yes.

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