Mass
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Preparing Well For Mass

For a lot of us, preparing for Mass means finding socks and shoes for everybody and trying to get to church before Father walks up the aisle. However, there is something more to preparing for Mass, and a reason to do it well.

If you have the chance, the night before Mass, look over the readings and the Gospel for Sunday. (You can always find them here.) You don’t need to memorize them, but prayerfully read over them. It is also a good practice to read the Collect. This is the opening prayer the priest proclaims right before the readings. The Collect sets the “tone” for the liturgy. Listen to God’s voice; what stands out for you in these words? This preparation will help you enter into the readings more deeply when they are proclaimed at Mass.

Remember that when you enter a Catholic Church, Christ is present. He is present in the people, but He is present in the Eucharist (reserved in the tabernacle) Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Christ, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, is there, and we have the opportunity to be with Him. That alone should make us want to prepare well.

The Church requires us to fast for one hour prior to Mass (water and medications are allowed.) This small sacrifice is made so that we can focus on the Eternal Food that is Christ Himself.

When we enter a church, we bless ourselves with holy water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This is a remembrance of our baptism and our baptismal vows. It is a sign that we belong to Christ, sealed to Him at the time of our baptism. It should be done with reverence and faith.

Before we enter the pew, we genuflect. We genuflect in the direction of the tabernacle. This is our humble way of acknowledging Christ’s presence there. It is the gesture one would make before a king, and we are entering into the presence of the King of Kings. By reverently and prayerfully bending our knee and bowing our head, we are telling Christ, “I know I am in your presence, and that I am your  humble servant.”

In some churches, the tabernacle is kept in a small chapel, typically used for daily Mass and Adoration. In this case, one can simply bow reverently in the direction of the altar. This symbolizes our holy veneration of the altar, where the eternal Sacrifice of Christ will be celebrated.

It is good to arrive a bit early for Mass – 10 or 15 minutes is good. This gives us time to pray. The online ministries of Creighton University says this:

Just like all formal prayer, it is really important to ask for the grace we desire during this Eucharist. We have lots of things to ask for. We know people who are sick. We may be having financial difficulties. Our marriages may be strained. We might be heart sick about struggles our adult children are having. We have many needs. Our focus at this moment is to ask for the grace we need during this next hour, at this Eucharist. We might pray, “Lord, let me enter into this celebration of your love for me. I know that if I let you love me and give me your Good News, and its challenge, and if I let you fill me with your life-giving Body and Blood, I will have deeper peace and courage, hope and a sense of mission to return to my everyday life, in your Spirit.”

When we make the effort to prepare well for Mass, it means that we can enter into the Mystery of the liturgy more fully, with a heart and mind focused on Christ. Because we are fallible beings, we won’t always be able to this (or we are wrangling toddlers who don’t understand that Daddy is trying to pray!), but God appreciates and understands our efforts. And, like exercise of the body, the exercise of our will and spirit will make them stronger and our preparations better. We pray:

May we receive the bread of angels,
the King of kings and Lord of lords,
with humble reverence, with the purity and faith,
the repentance and love, and the determined purpose
that will help to bring us to salvation.
May we receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood, and its reality and power.

stronger than our scars
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Stronger Than Our Scars

You have bent down over our wounds and have healed us, giving us a medicine stronger than our scars, a mercy greater than our fault. Thus, even in sin, in virtue of your invincible love, served to raise us up to divine life. (Ambrosian Rite prayer)

A medicine stronger than our scars. That is profound. During Lent, many of us take the time to examine our weaknesses and our scars. But do we ponder the wondrous medicine that is the Cross?

Most of us have scars that are hidden, and we prefer it that way. We perceive our scars as weakness and failure. Sometimes they are: we sin. We do evil and fail to do good. We need the Sacrament of Reconciliation to heal our sin.

But some of our scars are ones life has left us with, through no fault of our own. We weep for our dead friends and family; we miss them and their loss is a scar on our heart. Perhaps our scars are borne from the addictions of others; we fear for the health and safety of loved ones who cannot seem to overcome their addictions to drugs or alcohol or pornography. Maybe we are in a marriage where one party is trying so very hard to be faithful and loving, and the other person wants out. And maybe we bear actual scars from disease, illness or accident – scars that cause us significant physical pain.

We think there is no medicine for these scars – no doctor can fix a broken heart or a parent’s tears. But Christ is the Great Physician, one who heals through the medicine of the Cross. Jesus was also a Man who Himself knew pain.

He was spurned and avoided by men,
a man of suffering, knowing pain,
Like one from whom you turn your face,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.
Yet it was our pain that he bore,
our sufferings he endured.
We thought of him as stricken,
struck down by God and afflicted,
But he was pierced for our sins,
crushed for our iniquity.
He bore the punishment that makes us whole,
by his wounds we were healed. – Is. 53:3-5

By his wounds we were healed. That is the radical truth of our faith: God became Man, took our sins and scars upon Himself, and saved us. Yes, we sin and we must acknowledge our sin, but sin no longer means death. Indeed, we are stilled scarred, but Christ provides us a medicine stronger than our scars. There is nothing and no one who is greater than this truth, this Good News, this Christ.

Today, take some time to thank Jesus for the medicine He has provided you. Rejoice in the fact that – despite our afflictions – we are healed through Christ our Lord.

radical prayer
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Radical Prayer

St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. (Pope Francis is a Jesuit priest.) The order is known for its great scholarship and truly brave priests. While many Jesuits teach, the Jesuit order is, at its heart, a missionary order, charged with taking the Gospel to those who do not know it.

The Jesuits owe much of their spirit and calling to their founder. St. Ignatius was a Spanish soldier from a noble family. As a young man he dreamed of great deeds as a knight, but injuries forced him to abandon this. While recuperating, he began to deeply contemplate what God wanted of him.

One of the prayers St. Ignatius left us is called the Suscipe, or the Radical Prayer:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.

No wonder it’s called the “Radical Prayer!” What a scary thought: that one should turn over everything to God! My free will, my memory … everything? Pray that I abandon my wants, desires and dreams for the will of God? Doesn’t that seem, well, just a little … crazy?

Perhaps. Lent is a good time to meditate on this prayer, even if one is not quite ready to pray it in earnest. We are Christians, after all: we bear the name of Christ because we choose to follow Him. And following Christ means a radical choice: picking up our cross, going wherever He sends us, becoming fishers of men.

St. Ignatius’ prayer acknowledges a simple truth: everything we have belongs to God. All the prayer says is, “I know that all I am is because of You, God. I want to use what You’ve given me, what You’ve made me, to do what You have planned for me.”

Even if we are not quite ready to pray this radical prayer, Lent is a good time to start asking God to lead you to it. What do you have planned for me, God? What is your will for me? How can I give everything to You, God?

heart
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Will You Transform Your Heart This Lent?

What will it take to transform your heart this Lent? Pope Francis, in his 2016 Lenten message to the Universal Church, tells us that – in the eternal love story that is God – mercy will transform our hearts.

God’s mercy transforms human hearts; it enables us, through the experience of a faithful love, to become merciful in turn. In an ever new miracle, divine mercy shines forth in our lives, inspiring each of us to love our neighbour and to devote ourselves to what the Church’s tradition calls the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. These works remind us that faith finds expression in concrete everyday actions meant to help our neighbours in body and spirit: by feeding, visiting, comforting and instructing them. On such things will we be judged. For this reason, I expressed my hope that “the Christian people may reflect on the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; this will be a way to reawaken our conscience, too often grown dull in the face of poverty, and to enter more deeply into the heart of the Gospel where the poor have a special experience of God’s mercy”. For in the poor, the flesh of Christ “becomes visible in the flesh of the tortured, the crushed, the scourged, the malnourished, and the exiled… to be acknowledged, touched, and cared for by us”. It is the unprecedented and scandalous mystery of the extension in time of the suffering of the Innocent Lamb, the burning bush of gratuitous love. Before this love, we can, like Moses, take off our sandals (cf. Ex 3:5), especially when the poor are our brothers or sisters in Christ who are suffering for their faith.

“Scandalous mystery:” what a profound phrase! The mystery and scandal are that Christ – the God-Man, who knew no sin – died for our sins with “gratuitous love.” We could spend all of Lent just meditating on that alone!

It is God’s mercy that transforms us. Yet, this is not a passive event; we must cooperate with God. We must do our part to become more loving, more merciful, to never grow “dull,” as the Holy Father says, in the face of another’s suffering.

What will transform your heart this Lent? In this Year of Mercy, let us all contemplate God’s mercy and how we can experience and share this tremendous gift.

Wounds of Jesus
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‘We Are The Wounds Of Christ’

The Diocese of Salt Lake City is publishing short reflections during the Year of Mercy. Today’s reflection is from Tom Devereux, who serves as a pastoral minister in a hospital:

This Year of Mercy is an invitation to love and to express compassion, to reach beyond what is comfortable, and to examine our own strengths and weaknesses. I recall during a visit to a hospital in Assisi, Pope Francis said, “We are among the wounds of Jesus.” For me, to share another’s cross, even if for a brief moment, is certainly that very invitation to love; it is indeed the invitation to spend time among the wounds of Jesus.

Mr. Devereux goes on to say that the diverse group of people he comes into contact with all deserve to be cared for with mercy. Read the rest of his reflection here.

simple offerings
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Simple Lenten Offerings

At CatholicLink, Luisa Restrepo has put together a list of 25 Simple Offerings to make this Lent a time to grow closer to Christ.

For instance: be joyful at work. Yup, every day. Joy is a virtue, so cultivate it.

Or you might try only buying what is necessary. Stay away from the mall, online shopping and the book store.

Don’t be negative on social media. Don’t give into the trolls, don’t be snarky, don’t be uncharitable.

Our Lenten sacrifices aren’t about “giving up” a bad habit just for the sake of gritting our teeth and getting through the next 40 days. It’s about becoming more like Christ. We are meant to be saints, so let’s get a bit closer to sainthood this Lent.