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China Retreat

August 10, 11, 12, 13

There will be Mass in China
on the 11th, 12th & 13th

Rita will be in China

at 12 noon on the 10th.

Exposed Eucharist

Please come and pray.

August 7, 2008

                    The gift of the Eucharist — I receive my Divine
                Almighty God — I long to serve Him — I empty myself
                at Mass — I know more what heaven is — this
                embrace of love and unity — the burning love of
                His fiery Heart — I watch the seeking for dominance,
                pride, jealousy, wanting others to fill us and give
                us peace — to even be under one in authority can
                cause some lack of peace — like those who say
                God isn't telling me what to do —

It is much like the garden — the devil tempted Eve

Genesis Chapter 3

Now, the snake was the most subtle of all the wild animals that Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, 'Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?' The woman answered the snake, 'We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, "You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death." ' Then the snake said to the woman, 'No! You will not die! God knows in fact that the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil.' The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was enticing for the wisdom that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realised that they were naked. So they sewed fig-leaves together to make themselves loin-cloths.

The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden. But Yahweh God called to the man. 'Where are you?' he asked. 'I heard the sound of you in the garden,' he replied. 'I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.' 'Who told you that you were naked?' he asked. 'Have you been eating from the tree I forbade you to eat?' The man replied, 'It was the woman you put with me; she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.' Then Yahweh God said to the woman, 'Why did you do that?' The woman replied, 'The snake tempted me and I ate.'

Then Yahweh God said to the snake, 'Because you have done this,

    Accursed be you
    of all animals wild and tame!
    On your belly you will go
    and on dust you will feed
    as long as you live.
    I shall put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
    it will bruise your head
    and you will strike its heel.'

    To the woman he said:

    I shall give you intense pain
        in childbearing,
    you will give birth to your children
        in pain.
    Your yearning will be for your husband,
    and he will dominate you.

To the man he said, 'Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat,

    Accursed be the soil because of you!
    Painfully will you get your food from it
    as long as you live.
    It will yield you brambles and thistles,
    as you eat the produce of the land.
    By the sweat of your face
    will you earn you food,
    until you return to the ground,
    as you were taken from it.
    For dust you are
    and to dust you shall return.

The man named his wife 'Eve' because she was the mother of all those who live. Yahweh God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them. Then Yahweh God said, 'Now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live for ever!' So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he had been taken. He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the great winged creatures and the fiery flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

Eve wanted to be equal to God

In effect Eve said "I won't obey You God"

The New Eve is the perfect handmaid of the Lord —

                We should cry to be able to go to Mass
                We should cry to be able to receive Jesus truly present
                        in communion

The devil wants — busy minds

                Some people always do the opposite of what God
                    wants and wonder why they have a life
                    of disharmony

They fight God — they are fighting His will —

                    Man under the influence of the evil one gives
                into pride, God gives him the ability to love and
                to seek good — The man may in secret get his satisfaction
                of disobeying authority instead of being faithful —
                It is like outsmarting God they think
                    It is like Eve in the garden
                    Instead of learning to give to others —
                    They selfishly bury their talent for themselves

Matthew 25: 14-30

‘It is like a man about to go abroad who summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to a third one, each in proportion to his ability. Then he set out on his journey. The man who had received the five talents promptly went and traded with them and made five more. The man who had received two made two more in the same way. But the man who had received one went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. Now a long time afterwards, the master of those servants came back and went through his accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents came forward bringing five more. "Sir," he said, "you entrusted me with five talents; here are five more that I have made." His master said to him, "Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness." Next the man with the two talents came forward. "Sir," he said, "you entrusted me with two talents; here are two more that I have made." His master said to him, "Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness." Last came forward the man who had the single talent. "Sir," said he, "I had heard you were a hard man, reaping where you had not sown and gathering where you had not scattered; so I was afraid, and I went off and hid your talent in the ground. Here it is; it was yours, you have it back." But his master answered him, "You wicked and lazy servant! So you knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered? Well then, you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have got my money back with interest. So now, take the talent from him and give it to the man who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but anyone who has not, will be deprived even of what he has. As for this good–for–nothing servant, throw him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth."

They can treat God like a rival —
Living a life of disharmony fighting God —

"I got my way God —
I can one up you —

                    I don't need authority and obedience —" the fool says,
                    Much like Eve in the garden —
                    They make God's will a rival for themselves —
                    Reaping disharmony and disharmony

Look at the Garden of Eden —
see how God acted for rejecting the Father's will

                Refusal of recognizing God's gifts
                    of fighting with our brothers instead of being
                    team players — is
                    division in the heart with God's plan for us and
                    the greatest commandment

Matthew 22: 36-40

'Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?' Jesus said to him, 'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: You must love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets too.'

                We are to love God
                That means love His will for us
                That doesn't mean fight authority
                That means learning to obey —

For all eternity we will be in the Father's will

Choosing God's will — not ours is the story of
the disobedience of the garden

Meditating on the garden of Gethsemane is
the new Adam —

obeying His Father to His death on the cross

Matthew 26: 36-46

Then Jesus came with them to a plot of land called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Stay here while I go over there to pray.’ He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee with him. And he began to feel sadness and anguish.

Then he said to them, ‘My soul is sorrowful to the point of death. Wait here and stay awake with me.’ And going on a little further he fell on his face and prayed. ‘My Father,’ he said, ‘if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it.’ He came back to the disciples and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, ‘So you had not the strength to stay awake with me for one hour? Stay awake, and pray not to be put to the test. The spirit is willing enough, but human nature is weak.’ Again, a second time, he went away and prayed: ‘My Father,’ he said, ‘if this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, your will be done!’ And he came back again and found them sleeping, their eyes were so heavy. Leaving them there, he went away again and prayed for the third time, repeating the same words. Then he came back to the disciples and said to them, ‘You can sleep on now and have your rest. Look, the hour has come when the Son of man is to be betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up! Let us go! Look, my betrayer is not far away.’

John 20: 19-21

In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, 'Peace be with you,' and, after saying this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy at seeing the Lord, and he said to them again, 'Peace be with you.

'As the Father sent me,
so am I sending you.'

                The more the world gives into divisive reasoning —
                    seeking dominance for vain glory —
                    divorces —
                    division —
                    not working in community as a team player
                    ignoring authority

and rivalry in one's own heart against the will
of God —

                There will not be peace in our hearts
                There will not be peace in nations
                There will not be peace in families
                There will not be peace in communities

Religious orders will be divided or fewer and fewer

St. Augustine says —
"peace is the tranquility of order"

Fr. Carter

                    "God has put order into His creation and this
                order must be respected and promoted if peace
                is to prevail. To the extent that the human family
                lives according to God's will — lives according
                to the order or the plan God has established
                for creation — to that extent does peace exist in
                the various segments of human society. To the
                extent there are violations of God's plan,
                of His will, to that extent peace is absent."

Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, life.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The Our Father

Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

Shepherds of Christ

Priestly Newsletter 2000 Issue 3

The Father's Will for Us - Our Source of Peace

If we are to be instruments of peace, we ourselves must be at peace. Our personal peace is that tranquility of order which results from our doing God’s will. The more we are united through love with God in the doing of His will, the more we experience peace.

Sometimes the sense of peace we experience is so strong that we can "feel" it pulsating throughout our being. These are periods of what we may call the experience of extraordinary peace. This type of peace usually is not an everyday occurrence.

Most of the time we live immersed in a more subdued kind of peace which results from our daily attempts to do God’s will in love. It is that peace which is a welcome and sustaining companion as we walk the path of everyday life with its usual assortments of joys and disappointments, successes and failures, laughter and tears.

Occasionally, very deep suffering may enter our lives. It is during these times that we need special determination to preserve ourselves in a basic peace of spirit despite the very significant pain. One may wonder how a person can be at peace amidst the experience of great suffering. St. Francis de Sales in one of his writings—and I have not been able to locate the exact place—offers an analogy which I think is very helpful. He asks us to picture an ocean body of water at the time of a violent storm. The surface of the water becomes extremely turbulent. Francis asks us, as we use our imagination, to descend beneath the surface of the water into its depth. What do we find? The more deeply one descends away from the turbulent surface, the calmer the water becomes. Likewise, says the saint and doctor of the Church, should it be with us during times of profound suffering. Although the surface of the spirit may be very agitated, one can still maintain basic peace of spirit by going deep down to one’s center where God is more directly experienced. Here the person experiences a calm, a basic peace, although the suffering remains.

If we are trying to do God’s will in love, God intends us to be at peace. The more we conform to God’s will, the more we are living according to the order He intends for us. In turn, the more our lives are in harmony with the order established by God, the more we experience peace—peace being the tranquility of order. The more we ourselves live in this manner, the more fit instruments we become for promoting God’s order and consequent peace throughout the various segments of society.

St. Dominic was an outstanding witness to the peace of the Lord: "Dominic possessed such great integrity and was so strongly motivated by divine love, that without doubt he proved to be a bearer of honor and grace. He was a man of great equanimity, except when moved to compassion and mercy. And since a joyful heart animates the face, he displayed the peaceful composure of a spiritual man in the kindness he manifested outwardly and by the cheerfulness of his countenance."¹⁴

Shortly before he was to die from cancer, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin left us these inspiring words about peace: "It is the first day of November, and fall is giving way to winter. Soon the trees will lose the vibrant colors of their leaves and snow will cover the ground. The earth will shut down, and people will race to and from their destinations bundled up for warmth. Chicago winters are harsh. It is a time of dying.

"But we know that spring will soon come with all its new life and wonder.

"It is quite clear that I will not be alive in the spring. But I will soon experience new life in a different way…

"What I would like to leave behind is a simple prayer that each of you may find what I have found—God’s special gift to us all: the gift of peace. When we are at peace, we find the freedom to be most fully who we are, even in the worst of times. We let go of what is non-essential and embrace what is essential. We empty ourselves so that God may more fully work within us. And we become instruments in the hands of the Lord."¹⁵

St. Teresa of Avila, one of the three women doctors of the Church, tells us how the spiritual life is summed up in loving conformity to the Father’s will:

"All that the beginner in prayer has to do -- and you must not forget this, for it is very important -- is to labor and to be resolute and prepare himself with all possible diligence to bring his will in conformity with the will of God. As I shall say later, you may be quite sure that this comprises the very greatest perfection which can be attained on the spiritual road."¹⁶

Again she states: "...love consists ... in the firmness of our determination to try to please God in everything." ¹⁷

NOTES:

14. "From the Various Writings of the History of the Order of Preachers," as in The Liturgy of the Hours, Catholic Book Publishing Co., Vol lV, p. 1302.
15. Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, The Gift of Peace, Loyola University Press, pp. 151-153.
16. St Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, translated by E. Allison Peers, Doubleday and Co., "Second Mansions", p. 51.
17. Ibid., "Fourth Mansions", p. 76.

Shepherds of Christ

Priestly Newsletter 2000 Issue 3

Eucharist

From a spiritual journal: "Go to the tabernacle. Jesus will give us our answers. He is waiting for us to come. We must come and sit in silence and let Him work in our hearts. We must not be filled with fear, we should be filled with hope and joy. We must pray to the Holy Spirit to give us His wisdom to know the will of the Father. Mary is our Mother. She will help us with all our trials and all of our struggles. We must discipline our thoughts and go to the Heart of Jesus. It is through the Eucharist that we will be strengthened for our trials.

"This is how I am with Jesus. I am empty. I want Him to make Himself known to me. I didn’t have much theological knowledge when I started sitting in front of the tabernacle. I was looking for love from Jesus. Nobody loved me the way my soul wanted to be loved. I craved to be with Jesus. I wanted my heart filled. I wanted the craving I felt inside satisfied. I thirsted for love. I sat with Him present in the tabernacle and He filled me. He revealed Himself to me. He was the Bridegroom of my soul and I His bride. As I became more intimately united to Him, sitting there in silence and going to Him, I cried. I was so filled with love. I found what I was looking for all my life. He wrote the knowledge of Himself on my soul. He wrote this knowledge in the intimate moments I spent with Him at Mass after Communion and before the tabernacle.

"I struggle intently to do His work, and I am weary from running the race. I am tired, I am truly human, but the unquenchable love I have for Him in my heart is at the core of my existence. It is in Him I exist and in Him I love. I love Him so intently and yet I am so unworthy of His gifts given to me. I long more for the desire to help souls, and His desires become mine through my deep union with Him especially after the reception of the Eucharist. On this day (Feast of the Assumption), I felt the unquenchable purity of the Heart of Mary and the joy of dwelling deeply in His Heart in her pure love. It was a special gift He gave to me, to be wrapped in Mary’s Heart despite my faults. He gave Himself so completely to me. I only long for this, knowing this presence.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta shares these thoughts with us: "I make a holy hour each day in the presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. All my sisters of the Missionaries of Charity make a daily holy hour, as well, because we find that through our daily holy hour our love for Jesus becomes more intimate, our love for each other more understanding, and our love for the poor more compassionate. Our holy hour is our daily family prayer where we get together and pray the Rosary before the exposed Blessed Sacrament for the first half hour, and the second half hour we pray in silence. Our adoration has doubled our vocations. In 1963, we were making a weekly hour together, but it was not until 1973, when we began our daily holy hour that our community started to grow and blossom."³³

St. Peter Julian Eymard, founder of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers, tells us: "The Eucharist, behold the Christian's treasure, his delight on earth. Since Jesus is in the Eucharist for him personally, his whole life ought to be drawn to it like a magnet to its center."³⁴

33. Mother Teresa, Rosary Meditations from Mother Teresa, contact Missionaries of the Blessed Sacrament, PO Box 1701, Plattsburgh, New York.
34. St. Peter Julian Eymard, Eucharistic Handbook, Emmanuel Publications, as in Adoration, Ignatius Press, p.97.

                Jesus: I speak of order and love — obedience to
                the Father's will — without structure — utter chaos —
                I give you the 10 commandments they are disobeyed —
                Selfishness - your thoughts are not like brothers
                of love, building My Father's Kingdom —

                    Satan sends his people out to scatter —
                to divide, to hate — to be selfish — to seek dominance
                for dominance sake

Mary is the perfect handmaid of the Lord —

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Infant of Prague 24" - $125 plus shipping	Divine Mercy 22" - $100 plus shipping	Holy Family 24" - $180 plus shipping

St. Jude 24" - $125 plus shipping	Our Lady of Guadalupe 24" - $125 plus shipping	Holy Family 12" - $60 plus shipping

St. Therese 24" - $125 plus shipping	St. Francis 24" - $125 plus shipping	St. Anthony 24" - $125 plus shipping

St. Claire 24" - $125 plus shipping	St. Padre Pio 24" - $125 plus shipping	St. Joseph 24" - $125 plus shipping

St. Francis 18" - $65 plus shipping	St. Therese 18" - $65 plus shipping	St. Philomena 20" - $100 plus shipping 16" - $65 plus shipping

Angel 22" - $100 plus shipping	St. Rita 12" - $40 plus shipping	Our Lady of Guadalupe 12" - $40 plus shipping

Pieta - Color $75 plus shipping	Pieta - Marble $75 plus shipping	Fatima w/glass 11" - $150 plus shipping

Pilgrim Virgin w/glass 12" - $160 plus shipping	Fatima w/glass 18" - $250 plus shipping	Pilgrim Virgin w/glass 27” - $450.00 — 18” - $250.00 15” - $200.00 - (plus shipping)

	Size	Price	Quantity
Holy Family	24"	$125
Immaculate Heart of Mary	24"	$125
Immaculate Heart - Ivory	24"	$125
Infant of Prague	24"	$125
Limpus	24"	$125
Our Lady of Grace	24"	$125
Our Lady of Guadalupe	24"	$125
Our Lady of Lourdes	24"	$125
Our Lady of Mt. Carmel	24"	$125
Sacred Heart of Jesus	24"	$125
Sacred Heart of Jesus -Blessing	24"	$125
Sorrowful Mother	24"	$125
St. Anthony	24"	$125
St. Claire	24"	$125
St. Francis	24"	$125
St. Joseph	24"	$125
St. Jude	24"	$125
St. Padre Pio	24"	$125
St. Therese	24"	$125
Angel	22"	$100
Divine Mercy	22"	$100
St. Philomena	20"	$100
St. Philomena	16"	$65
St. Francis	18"	$65
St. Therese	18"	$65
Pieta - Color	15"	$75
Pieta - Marble	15"	$75
Holy Family	12"	$60
Our Lady of Guadalupe	12"	$40
St. Rita	12"	$40

Fatima w/glass	11"	$150
Fatima w/glass	18"	$250
Pilgrim Virgin w/glass	12"	$160
Pilgrim Virgin w/glass	15"	$200.00
Pilgrim Virgin w/glass	18"	$250.00
Pilgrim Virgin w/glass	27"	$450.00

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