God is counting on you.
God’s plan for the Universe includes you.
God’s plan for History includes you.
God’s plan of Salvation includes you.
God planned you.
You count!
Catch God’s vision.
When you are down,
Ask God, what’s up?
Plans can go wrong
But God is on track.
Are you?
Be faithful.
Little choices add up.
The ordinary is grace-filled opportunity.
That is the stuff of Saints
©2011 Joann Nelaneder
Upon the cross,
Your blood flowed
From Crown to Foot,
In streams upon Your Body,
So that there was not one space
That was not touched by Your Blood.
Your Body, the Church,
Covered in Your Blood,
Saved throughout Time
And for all Time
Unto Eternity,
Covered by Your Blood.
Stolen name replaced by number,
Savaged soul and broken heart.
Hell, a people to encumber.
Blind eyes outside in darkness.
Dead souls dismissed the unthinkable.
Stolen name replaced by number.
Raising from the ashes,
Pledging nevermore.
Hell, a people to encumber.
Yad VaShem, the vault of memory,
Yad VaShem, the ground of tears.
Stolen name replaced by number.
Shoah: families, children.
Here named, remembered, mourned.
Hell, a people to encumber.
Faces pictured in the silence.
Tears cried forevermore.
Stolen name replaced by number.
Hell, a people to encumber.
Today, I live by Your Will.
Today, I live by Your Cross.
Today, I live by the grace of God.
I call on all heaven
To pray for me,
As I am weak,
And prone to sin.
With Isaiah, I promise God,
That I will not be silent,
I will cry out
For the sake of Jerusalem.
You, saints of God,
I station you on my walls
And at the city gate.
Do not cease
To petition the King,
For He is poised
To answer the persistent.
© 2011 Joann Nelander
Today, I live by Your Will.
Today, I live by Your Cross.
Today, I live by the grace of God.
I call on all heaven
To pray for me,
As I am weak,
And prone to sin.
With Isaiah, I promise God,
That I will not be silent,
I will cry out
For the sake of Jerusalem.
You, saints of God,
I station you on my walls
And at the city gate.
Do not cease
To petition the King,
For He is poised
To answer the persistent.
© 2011 Joann Nelander
Dearest Love, shine in my humanity,
Making my soul radiant.
I come to know You in my waiting.
As the world passes,
I witness the parade of fools and follies.
From my window, I surmise
The ways of friend and foe,
And resolve that my lover
Must be a friend
And lover of my soul,
Cherishing it as his own.
My Lover bids me call,
And call I do,
Throughout the bitter night
And in the brightness
Of each new day.
When I call He always comes,
I do not doubt His promise or His Presence.
“Knock and it shall be opened.”
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock;
If anyone hears My voice and opens the door,
I will come in to him…’
I embrace Him, Whom I love,
Even when He comes and hides,
For He takes pleasure of watching me
In my search of faith.
I know He is here.
He is near,
Attuned to my longing,
Knowing that the treasure
Of my possessing Him
Increases as my desire
To see Him grows.
My seeking is both invitation and encounter.
My eyes may be blind,
But my soul is awake to His nearness
And reaches to catch Him
As He plays with me.
My soul ensnares Him
And begs Him do not run away.
Let me breathe Your essence.
Your Presence is my delight.
Though Your Spirit be like the wind,
Then tousle my hair as You rush by.
Let me find evidence of Your visit,
In the changes in my being.
I pledge my ardor
And banish the lukewarm.
I promise my heart
And scorn all negligence.
Vain imaginings
Shall not steal my soul.
Your promise is all I need.
If it seems You are gone,
I shall search You out,
Until I find our hiding place
And lie beside You.
I will ravish You by sighs of love
And hold you fast
By reins of love’s longing,
For You have conquered the world
And won my heart.
You have conquered my depths
By knowing Your beloved.
Your chamber remains within my soul,
Our secret place of meeting.
All is in readiness for You,
Though You come late in the night.
My room is swept clean and I am eager.
Your coming is all sun,
And You waken me by Your Light.
I draw You by spiritual reins,
By my plaintive call.
All the world is witness
To the power of virginal love.
Is it not the Virgin Mother,
Who now instructs my soul?
Pristine the whiteness
Engulfed in radiant flame,
Golden the rays,
Set about Your throne upon the altar.
For all the beauty of the monstrance,
You outshine the artist’s creation,
Just as You outshine Creation.
Give me eyes to see the Reality.
My eyes are designed to apprehend matter.
Here, You give us Mystery, Divinity.
I long to look upon Your fleshly Flesh,
To see Your locks curl mildly on Your shoulders,
To see the flash of smile and twinkle of the eye,
Majesty of manner, and goodly gentleness.
I gaze upon the Host,
All the while my heart and mind
Bring visions to the fore.
Power subdued in obedience,
Might bowed to the Father’s Will,
Abandonment, a fulfillment of prophetic word,
Suffering and salvific.
A Babe, a Boy, a Man,
Commending unto You
From womb to tomb,
In ignominy, yet dignity,
A Life and Death
Swallowing up Your wrath.
He bequeathed to us His Mother,
His ark and monstrance,
Forever refuge of the sinner at the altar.
At the altar of His Dying,
He willed to us a Mother,
Pristine Whiteness.
Legnica, Poland, Apr 18, 2016 / 02:59 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A bleeding Host that “has the hallmarks of a Eucharistic miracle” was approved for veneration in Poland over the weekend.The announcement was made by Bishop Zbigniew Kiernikowski of Legnica on April 17.On Christmas Day 2013, a consecrated Host fell to the floor, the bishop said. It was picked up and placed in a container with water. Soon after, red stains appeared on the host.Then-Bishop of Legnica, Stefan Cichy, created a commission to monitor the host. In February 2014, a small fragment was placed on a corporal and underwent testing by various research institutes.The final medical statement by the Department of Forensic Medicine found: “In the histopathological image, the fragments were found containing the fragmented parts of the cross striated muscle. It is most similar to the heart muscle.” Tests also determined the tissue to be of human origin, and found that it bore signs of distress.Saying that the Host “has the hallmarks of a Eucharistic miracle,” Bishop Kiernikowski explained that in January 2016 he presented the matter to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.In April, in accordance with the Holy See’s recommendations, he asked parish priest Andrzej Ziombrze “to prepare a suitable place for the Relics so that the faithful could venerate it.”Tags: Eucharist, Catholic News, MiracleREAD NEXT »
Source: Check out this Eucharistic miracle in Poland :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)
Via First Things
He was a dignified man suffering all the embarrassing ways a hospice deals with the body’s failure as cancer begins shutting down the organs. Dying in a hospice, you lose all rights to modesty as you lose control of your body. Few men could have found the indignities of those last few weeks of life more excruciating than did my father.
The man who was always in control depended entirely on the help of others, most of them strangers, most of them nurses’ aides, cheerful young women the age of his granddaughter. The man who was always doing something constructive could not move from his bed. The man who had always made his words count could not speak. The man who was always reserved could hide nothing, keep nothing to himself.
I did not want to see him there. This was what dying of cancer is like, and my father, being the man he was, took it like a man. It was the hand he’d been dealt, and he was going to play it, as bad as it was.
Though he died five years ago, in bookstores I still find myself starting to buy a book I know he’ll like, and thinking as I start to pull it off the shelf, “No, wait,” or deciding to ask his advice on a matter great or small, and thinking as I reach for my phone, “No, wait.” Every time I feel that sharp burning pain behind the sternum you get when your body panics and floods itself with adrenalin. The world has a hole in it and one that will never be filled in this life.
It is a great blessing to be with your father as he dies, though mercifully a blessing you will enjoy only once. I was sitting in his room at the hospice, my wife and children having run round the corner to get lunch, my mother having lunch with an old friend round another corner, my sister up the road at her job running a thrift store. He had, as far as we knew, as far as the doctors knew, weeks to live.
I had been there for a couple of hours, editing something on my laptop, focused on the work, when suddenly I knew, I don’t know how, other than Grace, that he was breathing his last. He drew in a short, hard breath. I knelt by his head and said, “Goodbye, dad.” He drew in a shorter, shallower breath, almost a half-breath, and then stopped.
I went to get the nurse, waving my hand toward the room because I could not speak. She came in, listened for a heartbeat, and I stood hoping I was wrong, that I’d missed something, that I was going to be embarrassed, till she shook her head at another nurse who had come into the room behind me.
Being there was, as I say, a great blessing. At least, it is a great blessing to be with your father when he dies if he died the way mine did. He did not die with dignity, as those who promote “death with dignity” define it, which means, in essence, to die as if you weren’t dying.
It is not dignified to be undressed and dressed by cheerful young women the age of your granddaughter. It is not dignified to waste away, to lose the ability to speak, to eat, to drink. It is not dignified for your children and grandchildren to see you that way. It is not dignified to die when death takes you and not when you choose.
I can see the appeal of “death with dignity” and programs like those offered in Oregon and the Netherlands, where doctors will help you leave this world at the moment of your choosing, without fuss or bother or pain. I do not want to die and I really, really do not want to die the way my father did. I would find the indignities as excruciating as he did, and I have no confidence I would deal with the pain as bravely as he. I would not want my children to see me so pathetic.
“Death with dignity” seems to offer not only an escape from pain and humiliation but a rational and apparently noble way to leave this life. You look death in the eye and show him that you, not he, are in control. All “dying with dignity” requires is that you declare yourself God. Make yourself the lord of life and death, and you can do what you want. All you have to do, as a last, definitive act, is to do what you’ve been doing all your life: Declare yourself, on the matter at hand, the final authority, the last judge, the one vote that counts.
But you are not God, and, the Christian believes, the decision of when to leave this life is not one He has delegated to you. It is not your call. The Father expects you to suffer if you are given suffering and to put up with indignities if you are given indignities. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord. And that, as far as dying goes, is that.
This is not, from a worldly point of view, a comforting or comfortable teaching. It is one much easier for Christians to observe in theory than in practice, and to apply to other people than to themselves. In practice, we will want to die “with dignity.”
My father was an engineer, not a philosopher. I’m not sure if he read a theological book in his life. The questions that interested me bemused him. But he knew who he was and what he was called to do, a condition others would put in a theological language I suspect he thought was unnecessary. He was dying. That was his job, and he would do it as well as he could.
Lying in a hospice bed, in the very last situation he would have chosen for himself, my father taught me that to die with dignity means to accept what God has given you and deal with it till the end. It means to play the hand God has dealt you, no matter how bad a hand it is, without folding. It means actually to live as if the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away, and in either case blessed be the name of the Lord.
It’s dignity of a different sort than the corruptingly euphemistic slogan “death with dignity” suggests. There is a great—an eternal—dignity in accepting whatever indignities you have to suffer to remain faithful to God and to do what He has given you to do. A man can be humiliated and yet noble, and the humiliations make the nobility all the more obvious. My father died with dignity, though the advocates of euthanasia and the clean, quick, controlled exit might not think so.
Here my father held a line he probably did not recognize, a line that protects the vulnerable. He would never have said this, and would have thought the idea pretentious. But by living as if his life was not his to give up he also declared in the most practical way possible that the lives of the vulnerable are not for others to take. There are only a few steps from declaring that a man may choose to be killed to choosing death for those who cannot choose for themselves. The vulnerable are protected by those who refuse the choice.
The man who chooses the timing and meaning of his own death has looked death in the eye and shown him that he is in control—but only by giving death what he demands even sooner than he demands it. That, presumably, is a deal death will take. My father, lying in the bed by the window in a hospice he would never leave, offered death no deal at all.
David Mills is deputy editor of First Things.
Mary Co-Redemptrix 