“And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!’” (Mt 21:9).
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Before our Lord arrives at this scene of mourning and distress, He had allowed everything to get as bad as it could possibly have gotten. Lazarus had taken ill and died.
It is a feature of the Lenten Gospel readings for Year A that the events recounted are very vivid. The persons involved are so memorable, so human, so similar to us, that we have little trouble placing ourselves in these scenes, imagining that we are there.
When we think of St Joseph, patron of the universal Church, certain words come immediately to mind: faithful, just, obedient, silent. There is precious little information in Scripture about him, but these words always seem apt to describe his character.
In our Lord’s conversation with the Samaritan woman we can hear, as St Augustine observes, one of Christ’s most attractive and tender invitations: “Come to me, all you who labor and find life burdensome, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28)
Our own “desert” to which Christ is calling us might be anything from a private home, to an office cubicle, to a city street. Wherever the contents of our hearts can and should be revealed, there the Bridegroom awaits us.
To have been embraced by the blessed Virgin as our mother in her moment of supreme grief leaves no doubt about the special worth that she places on suffering in our lives.
No one is more aware of the passage of time than a convert. There is a clear before and after whose threshold is a life-changing encounter with Christ.
“Towards Holiness” is an excerpt from the homily given by St. Josemaria Escriva on November 26, 1967.
God is getting awfully close. And the closer He gets the more He takes the controls out of our hands. It’s hard to miss that in these concluding days of Advent, as we review the events leading up to our Lord’s birth.
Nothing is more bitter than getting what you want and then finding out it wasn’t what you really needed. Dissatisfied with ourselves, our lives, we might search long and hard for a missing piece and discover, in the end, that it was never really the main thing.
It might come as a shock to find out that Advent is more about preparing for the second coming of Christ than for the first. Or better: Advent teaches us that the same attitude we have toward the first coming is the same we will have toward the second.
God’s nearness is one of the most startling realizations for those who have begun living the spiritual life in earnest. That God sees and hears me, that He is both working through and loving me in all circumstances is a revelation that immediately inspires wonder.
In the three-year cycle of readings for the Solemnity of Christ the King, it might seem strange to have alternative Gospels that emphasize Christ’s weakness. What kind of kingship are we acknowledging and celebrating in Christ, the King?
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St Josemaria expresses the wish in The Way that we should learn to speak of the holy souls in purgatory as “My good friends the souls in purgatory” (571). These “good friends” of ours are not only our fellows in the sharing of spiritual goods, coheirs in the communion of saints, but also our teachers […]
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For mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us. St Teresa of Avila: The Book of Her Life, ch. 8, 5. Although we might associate St Teresa’s spirituality with the extraordinary—with her numerous visions, […]
“A man open to the presence of God discovers that God is always working and still works today: We should, then, let him enter and let him work.”
In her poem “Why I Love You, O Mary!”, Saint Therese of Lisieux says that the Blessed Virgin teaches her how to weep and rejoice—what to have sorrow for and what to rejoice over.
Saints have the uncanny ability to startle us with their insights into the basic truths of our faith. Until a holy person comes along and embodies the Gospel, its radical demands might suffer the fate of a museum piece—safely under glass, to be admired but not handled. In Saints we witness how grace works “in […]
On April 15, 1967, in an interview with Peter Forbarth of Time Magazine, St. Josemaria Escriva explained the why and much more about the founding and mission of Opus Dei in the Church and in the world.