It's Divine Mercy Sunday

John Paul II will also be beatified today by Pope Benedict XVI.

Prayers taught to St. Faustina by our Lord, Jesus Christ:

Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.

For the sake of His sorrowful Passion have mercy on us and on the whole world.

You expired, Jesus, but the source of life gushed forth for souls, and the ocean of mercy opened up for the whole world. O Fount of Life, unfathomable Divine Mercy, envelop the whole world and empty yourself out upon us.

O Blood and Water, which gushed forth from the Heart of Jesus as a fount of mercy for us. I trust in You!

Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One,
have mercy on us and on the whole world.
[recite this last prayer three times, once for each member of the Holy Trinity]

Amen.

Wintergreen is still in style

Yes, wintergreen (the kind of hat) is still in style when you are in MN on April 27th and it is 35 degrees outside!

Litany of Humility

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being loved...
From the desire of being extolled ...
From the desire of being honored ...
From the desire of being praised ...
From the desire of being preferred to others...
From the desire of being consulted ...
From the fear of being humiliated ...
From the fear of being despised...
From the fear of suffering rebukes ...
From the fear of being calumniated ...
From the fear of being forgotten ...
From the fear of being ridiculed ...
From the fear of being wronged ...
From the fear of being suspected ...
From the desire of being approved ...

That others may be loved more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be esteemed more than I ...
That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and I may decrease ...
That others may be chosen and I set aside ...
That others may be praised and I unnoticed ...
That others may be preferred to me in everything...
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should…

Two Easter bunnies

Clearly, I am into videos lately. These two girls are pretty stinkin' cute if I do say so myself. They love hanging out with each other. Both these gals can hold their own on the tramp, and with their feisty personalities, I think they will be able to hold their own in about any situation!

ABC's coming along

With Auntie Kim practicing the alphabet with Faustina along with the letters we are (slowly) putting up on the wall in her room - It is starting to click!

Easter 2011 in pictures

The Eighth Day

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The liturgical celebration of the Easter Vigil makes use of two eloquent signs. First there is the fire that becomes light. As the procession makes its way through the church, shrouded in the darkness of the night, the light of the Paschal Candle becomes a wave of lights, and it speaks to us of Christ as the true morning star that never sets – the Risen Lord in whom light has conquered darkness. The second sign is water. On the one hand, it recalls the waters of the Red Sea, decline and death, the mystery of the Cross. But now it is presented to us as spring water, a life-giving element amid the dryness. Thus it becomes the image of the sacrament of baptism, through which we become sharers in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Yet these great signs of creation, light and water, are not the only constituent elements of the liturgy of the Easter Vigil. Another essential feature is the ample encounter with the words of sacred Scripture that it provides. Before the liturgical reform there were twelve Old Testament readings and two from the New Testament. The New Testament readings have been retained. The number of Old Testament readings has been fixed at seven, but depending upon the local situation, they may be reduced to three. The Church wishes to offer us a panoramic view of whole trajectory of salvation history, starting with creation, passing through the election and the liberation of Israel to the testimony of the prophets by which this entire history is directed ever more clearly towards Jesus Christ. In the liturgical tradition all these readings were called prophecies. Even when they are not directly foretelling future events, they have a prophetic character, they show us the inner foundation and orientation of history. They cause creation and history to become transparent to what is essential. In this way they take us by the hand and lead us towards Christ, they show us the true Light.

At the Easter Vigil, the journey along the paths of sacred Scripture begins with the account of creation. This is the liturgy’s way of telling us that the creation story is itself a prophecy. It is not information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man himself came into being. The Fathers of the Church were well aware of this. They did not interpret the story as an account of the process of the origins of things, but rather as a pointer towards the essential, towards the true beginning and end of our being. Now, one might ask: is it really important to speak also of creation during the Easter Vigil? Could we not begin with the events in which God calls man, forms a people for himself and creates his history with men upon the earth? The answer has to be: no. To omit the creation would be to misunderstand the very history of God with men, to diminish it, to lose sight of its true order of greatness. The sweep of history established by God reaches back to the origins, back to creation. Our profession of faith begins with the words: “We believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth”. If we omit the beginning of the Credo, the whole history of salvation becomes too limited and too small. The Church is not some kind of association that concerns itself with man’s religious needs but is limited to that objective. No, she brings man into contact with God and thus with the source of all things. Therefore we relate to God as Creator, and so we have a responsibility for creation. Our responsibility extends as far as creation because it comes from the Creator. Only because God created everything can he give us life and direct our lives. Life in the Church’s faith involves more than a set of feelings and sentiments and perhaps moral obligations. It embraces man in his entirety, from his origins to his eternal destiny. Only because creation belongs to God can we place ourselves completely in his hands. And only because he is the Creator can he give us life for ever. Joy over creation, thanksgiving for creation and responsibility for it all belong together.

The central message of the creation account can be defined more precisely still. In the opening words of his Gospel, Saint John sums up the essential meaning of that account in this single statement: “In the beginning was the Word”. In effect, the creation account that we listened to earlier is characterized by the regularly recurring phrase: “And God said …” The world is a product of the Word, of the Logos, as Saint John expresses it, using a key term from the Greek language. “Logos” means “reason”, “sense”, “word”. It is not reason pure and simple, but creative Reason, that speaks and communicates itself. It is Reason that both is and creates sense. The creation account tells us, then, that the world is a product of creative Reason. Hence it tells us that, far from there being an absence of reason and freedom at the origin of all things, the source of everything is creative Reason, love, and freedom.

Here we are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are irrationality, lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of everything, or are reason, freedom and love at the origin of being? Does the primacy belong to unreason or to reason? This is what everything hinges upon in the final analysis.

As believers we answer, with the creation account and with John, that in the beginning is reason. In the beginning is freedom. Hence it is good to be a human person.

It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it. If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature.

But no, Reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine Reason. And because it is Reason, it also created freedom; and because freedom can be abused, there also exist forces harmful to creation. Hence a thick black line, so to speak, has been drawn across the structure of the universe and across the nature of man. But despite this contradiction, creation itself remains good, life remains good, because at the beginning is good Reason, God’s creative love. Hence the world can be saved. Hence we can and must place ourselves on the side of reason, freedom and love – on the side of God who loves us so much that he suffered for us, that from his death there might emerge a new, definitive and healed life.

The Old Testament account of creation that we listened to clearly indicates this order of realities. But it leads us a further step forward. It has structured the process of creation within the framework of a week leading up to the Sabbath, in which it finds its completion. For Israel, the Sabbath was the day on which all could participate in God’s rest, in which man and animal, master and slave, great and small were united in God’s freedom. Thus the Sabbath was an expression of the Covenant between God and man and creation. In this way, communion between God and man does not appear as something extra, something added later to a world already fully created. The Covenant, communion between God and man, is inbuilt at the deepest level of creation.

Yes, the Covenant is the inner ground of creation, just as creation is the external presupposition of the Covenant. God made the world so that there could be a space where he might communicate his love, and from which the response of love might come back to him. From God’s perspective, the heart of the man who responds to him is greater and more important than the whole immense material cosmos, for all that the latter allows us to glimpse something of God’s grandeur.

Easter and the paschal experience of Christians, however, now require us to take a further step. The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week. After six days in which man in some sense participates in God’s work of creation, the Sabbath is the day of rest. But something quite unprecedented happened in the nascent Church: the place of the Sabbath, the seventh day, was taken by the first day. As the day of the liturgical assembly, it is the day for encounter with God through Jesus Christ who as the Risen Lord encountered his followers on the first day, Sunday, after they had found the tomb empty.

The structure of the week is overturned. No longer does it point towards the seventh day, as the time to participate in God’s rest. It sets out from the first day as the day of encounter with the Risen Lord. This encounter happens afresh at every celebration of the Eucharist, when the Lord enters anew into the midst of his disciples and gives himself to them, allows himself, so to speak, to be touched by them, sits down at table with them. This change is utterly extraordinary, considering that the Sabbath, the seventh day seen as the day of encounter with God, is so profoundly rooted in the Old Testament.

If we also bear in mind how much the movement from work towards the rest-day corresponds to a natural rhythm, the dramatic nature of this change is even more striking. This revolutionary development that occurred at the very the beginning of the Church’s history can be explained only by the fact that something utterly new happened that day. The first day of the week was the third day after Jesus’ death. It was the day when he showed himself to his disciples as the Risen Lord. In truth, this encounter had something unsettling about it. The world had changed. This man who had died was now living with a life that was no longer threatened by any death. A new form of life had been inaugurated, a new dimension of creation. The first day, according to the Genesis account, is the day on which creation begins. Now it was the day of creation in a new way, it had become the day of the new creation. We celebrate the first day. And in so doing we celebrate God the Creator and his creation.

Yes, we believe in God, the Creator of heaven and earth. And we celebrate the God who was made man, who suffered, died, was buried and rose again. We celebrate the definitive victory of the Creator and of his creation. We celebrate this day as the origin and the goal of our existence. We celebrate it because now, thanks to the risen Lord, it is definitively established that reason is stronger than unreason, truth stronger than lies, love stronger than death. We celebrate the first day because we know that the black line drawn across creation does not last for ever. We celebrate it because we know that those words from the end of the creation account have now been definitively fulfilled: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31).

Amen.

[Pope Benedict's Easter Vigil Sermon]

Planting seeds

"It helps now and then to step back and take the long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts; it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is the Lord's work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us. No sermon says all that should be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church's mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are all about. We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and do it very, very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the Master Builder and the worker. We are workers, not Master Builders...ministers no Messiahs. We are prophets of a future that is not our own."

Archbishop Oscar Romero

The new atheism

On Monday evening Mike and I were listening to a Holy week retreat on EWTN. Paublo Straub (he is wonderful!) was giving the talk and during part of it he was talking about atheism. He explained how the word comes from Greek roots and means 'turning away from God' (a=against, theo=God). In the traditional understanding of atheism, a person denies that God exists. He was proposing that the 'new atheism' is a person freely accepting the fact that God exists, but having the attitude of pursuing one's own will and ignoring God's will. Basically, "I'm going to do it my way and I don't really care, God, what your will is".

This makes a great deal of sense to me as I look around the world and think about my own life. Pride is the greatest sin - and, of course, pride is selfishness. Father Strabo went on to explain Eve's fall in the Garden and how we experience this sin of pride in our daily lives. We want what we want with the result of ignoring God and, in turn, whether consciously or not, we try to make ourselves gods. How easy it is to go through life without prayer, reflection, meditation, time set aside to spend with our Creator. How easy it is to live in my own world, to not think about other people's feelings, perspectives, struggles or joys they are having. It is a constant battle and requires constant awareness to seek God's will and submit; the Christian life demands perseverance in laying down my own life so that I may be a empty vessel for the Lord to use. No one said the Christian life is easy.

At the Adoration chapel, I was thinking about my next question - how do I know and seek God's will. After all, I am only human and I do have desires, I do have ambitions, I do have emotions. How do I know the difference between my own will and whether I am truly seeking God's will? Obviously this is not a new question to humanity!

-prayer Constantly praying for grace to seek God's will. Making it a habit and training my intellect to consistently give my will over to the Lord. This is what Jesus did in the Garden and it is in the prayer The Our Father. This is basic, but I am finding there is a whole new depth and many many many layers of meaning to it.
- thinking and meditating on stories Thankfully, I have had a life surrounded by many strong Christians and hearing their stories of faith and how God has blessed them gives me great hope of following God's will. I like to think we are creative as human beings, but God is creativity and he can do whatever he wants! Any plan I may come up with for myself is an anthill compared to the glories God has in store for us and how he wants that story to unfold. There is no need for me to make my own plans when his are far better than I could ever imagine or anticipate.
- be willing to accept suffering I find the saints the greatest inspirations in this area. They had incredible hardships, but they joined their crosses to our Lord's and the example they have become for humanity over the centuries is a testament to how God raised them up to greatness. I am sure they have the closest seats in the house to our Lord in heaven.
- patience This is a particularly hard one for me, I am not a patient person! Usually I want results, I want to make things happen and that ends up in me forcing an issue to doing things my own way. I need to wait for the Lord to unravel his will for me, listen and do my best to have a willing heart to follow

How will I know if I am following God's will? Well, a lot of the time, I probably won't. But I keep close to my heart something a read awhile ago about discernment. God told St. Francis Assisi to build his Church. Francis says, "Of course, Lord!" So he goes and starts literally gathering rocks and bricks to build a church. God said, "No, no, no, no. I need you to build my Church"; eventually, Francis figured out what the Lord meant which was to serve the people and preach truth. When we do our best to seek God's will and take action doing whatever it is we think we should do, God will slowly guild us, nudge us in this direction, take our hand and point us in this other direction. His grace is sufficient, and somehow it works out.

The new atheism - doing our will and not God's - abounds everywhere in our world, it probably is the most natural trap for us to fall into given our human nature. This week of Holy week, thankfully, provides a special time to reflect on how Jesus listened to the will of his Father. That sacrifice he made for us has become our way to salvation. Lord, continue to conform my will during this Easter season.

Carrying our own crosses

A dear friend gave me this prayer; it is especially fitting for Easter week as we reflect on carrying our own crosses in order to draw closer to our Lord during our earthly life.

"The everlasting God has in His wisdom foreseen from eternity the cross that He now presents to you as a gift from His inmost Heart.

This cross He now sends you He has considered with His all-knowing eyes, understood with His Divine mind, tested with His wise justice, warmed with loving arms and weighed with His own hands to see that it be not one inch too large and not one ounce too heavy for you.

He has blessed it with His Holy Name, anointed it with His grace, perfumed it with His consolation, taken one last glance at you and your courage, and then sent it to you from Heaven, a special greeting from God to you, an alms of the all-merciful love of God."
- Saint Francis de Sales

The Twins

I am getting a small taste of what it is like to have twins around - it is fun! Here are Isaac and James. We get to hang out with them on Thursdays and Fridays. The sleeping arrangements are a bit tight, but you learn how to make it work! They are sweet and good boys at the very fun age of 2. We are lucky to have such a full life with friends to hang out with! These two guys are very identical, they will definitely be able to pull a few tricks on people as they get older... :)

We made the switch

Over to Saint Agnes that is. During this Lent we have been going to Mass at Saint Agnes Church. Since Mike starting working at Saint Agnes School 2 years ago, I knew we would probably move over there at some point.

Since I studied in Rome during college, I came to truly love beautiful churches. One of the classes I took was a three hour on-sight course going to all the churches around Rome and learning about them. As I look back it was life changing and left impressions on me that I never knew would have such a long term impact. It is our human nature, we simply are built to seek beauty, imitate it and love it - we can't resist being drawn to it!

Here we find ourselves parishioners at Saint Agnes and here area few things I appreciate about it.

- the stunning Church itself! The Staions of the Cross are breathtaking, the statues around the Church allow me to experience the communion of Saints in a real way, all the art work is inspiring and brings my mind to the Divine

- As I get older and experience more joys and hardships in life, I find that the only true refuge for my heart is in the Church. Why would I settle for anything less than throwing myself into a parish which is always faithful to the Church's teaching (unfortunately, that is not the case with all parishes)

- We were married and had our kids baptized at the Cathedral - another beautiful Church. The influence that the art work has on the kids' and the images alone is enough for me to go to Saint Agnes. The pictures and statues tell the stories of our faith, history and traditions sometimes better than we adults can explain. I love to see Jude looking up at a statue Mary holding Jesus while he points and says, "Jesus!"

- The priests and their homilies are always quality, make me think, they are substantive, and educational. That is what I am looking for!

- I love the alter boys. They are a beautiful picture in and of themselves and always make me think of little angels surrounding the priest!

- The community is like no other. It is a culture of life with many kids and people of all types. Where else would you hear a man telling a friend (on the stairs going down to get donuts after Mass) "Thank you! Yes, this is our 6th child. My brother and his wife just had their 10th and my sister just had her 8th child." !!! Talk about a culture of life.

- I thoroughly appreciate the communion rail where you kneel and priest places the Eucharist in your mouth. This way of receiving communion puts in the forefront of my mind Jesus' sacrifice and that I am receiving the Divine Body of Christ.

- We already knew many people since Mike works there. It already felt like community when we switched over.

- We thoroughly enjoy the donuts and fellowship afterward! Not to mention they make amazing egg breakfast sandwiches. :)

The following quote sums it up:

When you step through the doorway of a church you are leaving the outer-world behind and entering an inner world. The outside world is a fair place abounding in life and activity, but also a place with a mingling of the base and ugly. It is a sort of market place, crossed and recrossed by all and sundry. Perhaps 'unholy' is not quite the word for it, yet there is something profane about the world. Behind the church doors is an inner place, separated from the market place, a silent, consecrated and holy spot. It is very certain that the whole world is the work of God and his gift to us, that we may meet Him anywhere, that everything we receive is from God's hand, and, when received religiously, is holy. Nevertheless men have always felt that certain precincts were in a special manner set apart and dedicated to God. ~ From Sacred Signs by Romano Guardini

Quilting phenomenon

This lady is amazing!

On another note, I'm finishing up (I guess I have been for awhile) my first quilt. I was reading a quilting book a few months ago and it was saying how every quilt 'has its own story'. That certainly makes a lot of sense. Quilts take a chunk of time and making a quilt would naturally be connected to what is going on in a person's life at that time. This first quilt is near and dear because I took a quilting class the fall the Mom died and this quilt is the product of that time. I used some of Mom's material and picked out some of my own. I can see how quilting is addicting with a the beautiful material! I learned a great deal through this class and it got me hooked.

Hey Jude

Jude loves 'his' song. Every time he hears it he starts swaying and saying "eyyyyy uuudddd" or he starts sprinting circles around the island. Faustina is wondering where 'her' song is.

75 Years of marriage

I love this story. A year ago when our family was going through a lot of things in the house on Niles we came across this story; I just 'refound' it and it puts a big smile on my face.

This article was published in a local newspaper in Monticello, MN several years ago. It is about Ann (my Mother's aunt) and Otto Thielman who hit their 75th wedding anniversary. My Mom absolutely loved this particular aunt and uncle. They had a beautiful house (really, practically a victorian mansion) close to Grandma and Grandpa Saunders' farm. Ann was the type of woman who was wearing pearl earrings, a dress and high heels even if she didn't leave the house for the day and was only doing chores. Otto had a natural handyman and was often working on different projects with his nice tool collection.

Here are a few of my favorites from the article.

"We're together all the time." said Otto.
Do they ever, have they ever, got on each other's nerves?
"No," he replied without hesitation. "She asks a lot of questions, but I do the best I can."
"I have to keep house for him," said Ann. "We're in the same boat. The main thing is, we're together."
"We manage each other pretty good." said Otto.
Ann is a little exasperated when asked what their secret is. It's a questions that's been put to them more than once over the previous three quarters of a century.
"There's no secret, if anyone knows how to be good to each other," she said. "You just keep loving. Where one goes, the other goes too. We fall asleep holding hands, and when we wake up, we're still holding hands in the morning. And we're always kissing each other, letting people know we're still married."
Their long happy and happy marriage will be recognized during St. Henry's Catholic Church's 10:30am mass this Sunday.
"It's been a long journey, and a wonderful one," said Ann. "I wouldn't want it any other way."

They lived to be 95 and 96, dying within 6 months of each. I love the line, "Marriage is no secret if anyone knows how to be good to each other."! If only the rest of the world thought it was that easy!

Learning new skills

This past year I have dove 100% into quilting and it is quite addicting. I embraced the long winter since I was happy with a cup of tea and the sewing machine in the basement working on quilts.

Quilting quickly opened my world to sewing and all the beautiful things I could potentially make. When Faustina moved into her 'big girl bed', I thought "What the heck, there are so many beautiful fabrics, I should just make Faustina's duvet.". I did and it was a fun project.

Unfortunately these crafts are not always as economical as going to the nearby Walmart and buying something made in China. Unfortunately. But, as I gather JoAnne coupons and look for deals, it can cut even with buy store bought stuff.

Many individuals ask me, "Why would you spend so much time on these projects when you can just go buy something?". Well, I guess there are a few reasons I would give.

1. I love doing things with my hands. That is probably just the way I'm built - I love manual labor type projects and creations. I sometimes joke that I should have been born hundreds of years ago - I enjoy doing sewing, knitting, cooking, outdoor work etc. Now these activities are more hobbies than necessary labors.

2. I like being creative.

3. I enjoy learning (I learned how to make button holes doing this duvet cover)

4. I think it is important to learn and practice skills. It is the case 'these days' (I sound like an old crabby person) that people don't have any practical skills. This could prove to be a big problems in the years and decades to come if the NEED for skills in life arises again and we don't have everything at our 10 second disposal.

5. I appreciate handing these skills, traditions, and culture to our kids. I know my Mother did and I am so appreciative.

6. It can save money done in the right way.

The duvet cover is from Amy Butler's 'In Stitches' book which has many very cute ideas and has a good range of beginner patterns to more experienced. Here is a picture of the duvet pattern from the book and then a picture of the book.