With St. John Paul II, on his 100 Birthday we look at Mary, through his eyes …

Mary is a “woman of the Eucharist” in her whole life.

If we wish to rediscover in all its richness the profound relationship between the Church and the Eucharist, we cannot neglect Mary, Mother and model of the Church.

How does one enter into the Event that we call Holy Week single-mindedly and prayerfully?

With JESUS of course – but then again, so much is happening to Him that it is hard to hold to any one moment intensely, if you want to live all of them. It seems too much like floating on the surface without being immersed in the mystery.

This year, maybe a good word to sit with and to carry through the week might be: Truth.

Do you believe this?

The Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you
Rom 8.11

We see in today’s Gospel reading, the friends of Jesus dealing with anxiety, sickness and death, part of life’s experience for each and every person in our day.

Aren’t we all Lazarus?

Are there not parts in each one of us, in me, that are dead, infected by the viruses of sins?

We are now in our final stretch of Lent which is a relief because, personally, I find Lent difficult. I find the fasting hard, but I came across a quotation from the ‘Magnificat’ which I found encouraging.

Fasting is a form of self deprivation of and a longing for the food we really need. We fast in order to seek Him day after day, the better to know His ways. We fast to make space for Christ, so that He may fill our emptiness with His redeeming presence.

This Sunday’s Gospel, John 4:5-42, is about Jesus who made a journey to a Samaritan town (it is always He who makes first move toward us) and was waiting at the well for the arrival of the Samaritan woman. Her thirst and longing bring her towards Him, though she wasn’t aware of it.

Recently my friend, was encouraging me with these words:

Always watch the mind, what it is thinking about, and always bring it back to Him from wherever it wanders off.

We are now in the middle of the second week of Lent and I’m sure some of us have already broken our Lenten Resolutions (repeatedly!!) and are feeling very discouraged about it all and tempted to just give up the attempt and pick something easier.

But maybe we should view these not as failures but as something that can be beneficial. It’s a bit like distractions during prayer. You might feel, ‘oh, I didn’t pray at all, I had so many distractions,’ but each time you realised that you had been distracted and turned back to God that was something good; that was prayer. It can be the same with our Lenten Resolutions.

God made the sinless one into sin, our sin, my sin, that in him we might become the goodness of God. And yet since the beginning of creation we have been denying our sin, that sin for which He emptied himself of his divinity, became man and endured His passion and death. We have been covering our nakedness up, hiding our reality from God, from ourselves and from one another.

While praying my Lectio Divina for the 5th Sunday of Ordinary Time the words that struck me were ‘Your light will shine like the dawn and your wound quickly healed over’.

The word ‘Light’ is repeated in the first reading, the psalm and the Gospel. Elsewhere, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus tells us ‘I am the light of the world.’ Turning to us, his disciples, He reminds us in today’s Gospel we too are the ‘light of the world.’

This icon, created by one of our sisters for St Peter's parish in Drogheda, is not a work of the imagination in which the artist tries to drag the onlooker inside an ideal family, but a theological teaching that exposes something of the Truth revealed in Jesus Christ. We do not enter into the icon, it is a sacred space delimitated by a red line all around it. It is the people, represented inside that space, that come to us. “The Kingdom of God is at hand!"

Disposed from childhood to praying the Rosary, it has grown with me over the years or perhaps it would be more true to say I’ve grown with it. A prayer for all seasons of life, it has been my mainstay. I think of the structure of the rosary, the saying of the beads as a kind of enclosure, creating and protecting a sacred space, a shelter, within which Mary and I meet with Jesus on a daily basis and she shows unto me the blessed fruit of her womb, JESUS.

Pope St John Paul II called the rosary his favourite prayer. While the Mass is my favourite prayer, the rosary is not far behind in my preference. If for any reason on a rare occasion I fail to say the rosary, then I cannot sleep until I say it in full.

The rosary is mostly centred on Jesus and Mary so for that reason, it is very precious to me: Jesus who is Alpha and Omega, and Mary who is His Mother. In the company of these two very important people, I am always happy.

Unlike most people of my generation, as a child the Rosary was still part of our family life. We knelt at our chairs in the kitchen each night and recited it together. By the early seventies, as we grew older, activities at night demanded our time and attention and the family Rosary gradually faded into oblivion. But the example of my parents and grandparents who always prayed the Rosary daily remained. My dad always had his beads in his pocket and prayed the rosary on the bus each morning as he travelled to work.

WE ARE ALL FAMILIAR WITH THE PASSAGE of the Passion Narrative in St. Mathew’s Gospel in which Jesus is brought before Pilate by the chief priests and elders to condemn Him to death. Pilate is convinced of his innocence but weak in his resolve to free him. He washes his hands and declares “I am innocent of this man’s blood. It is your concern! The rabble respond “His blood be upon us and upon our children.”

Think deeply for a moment—–‘Jesus loves us and washes away our sins in his own blood.’

With the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Lord’s Birth is at hand. With the words of the prophet Micah, the Liturgy invites us to look at Bethlehem, the little town in Judea that witnessed the great event. Unfortunately, in our day, it does not represent an attained and stable peace, but rather a peace sought with effort and hope.

O King whom all the peoples desire
You are the cornerstone which makes all one.
O come and save us whom you made from clay.

What is my desire? Do I really have desire for this King, as today’s ‘O Antiphon’ proclaimed?

‘O King whom all the peoples desire’

The desire for God is part of what we are.

On this the shortest day of the year it is appropriate that our ‘O Antiphon’ has the theme of light bringing us hope that darkness can never overpower Eternal Light.

Recently while reading an article in the National Geographic on ‘Solar Sailing in Space’- which I did not fully understand! – one sentence caught my attention: scientists in the last century have discovered that “light is pure energy – that property in nature that makes things go, run or happen.” These four words ‘light is pure energy’ seemed to jump out of the page and immediately all the references to light in relation to God in the Old and New Testaments flooded my mind. Light is pure energy! What a wonderful image of God!

As today, we pray in our ‘O Antiphon’ – ‘O key of David, come and close the path to misery’ or as another translation expresses it: ‘come and lead the captive free from prison, free those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’ – we reflect that a key both opens and locks a door. What is it that keeps our hearts and lives imprisoned and locked up? What door needs to be opened to free us to live peacefully and trustfully in the Presence of God in the midst of the daily upsets that can occur and all the noise and turmoil of today’s world?

What do you want from Christmas?

These last days of Advent seem to intend to teach us what to ask of the LORD – maybe in order that we may truly know and understand how to be human; and above all, that our humanity is meant to be one which seeks to serve.

Today we will sing the first of the ‘O Antiphons’; the beautiful Magnificat Antiphons for the final days of preparation for the coming of Christ at Christmas. These Antiphons address Christ by various titles/attributes and beseech him to ‘Come’.

This first Antiphon addresses Christ as ‘Wisdom’. It is a wonderful thing to recognise that Christ is Wisdom and to remember that “the wisdom which comes from above is marked chiefly indeed by its purity, but also by its peacefulness;

The first Reading of Mass is the invitation to joy. The prophet Zephaniah at the end of the seventh century B.C spoke of the city of Jerusalem and its people with the words: ‘’Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem…..! The Lord your God is in your midst.’’

On this Sunday the liturgy presents to us the Gospel passage in which St. Luke prepares the scene on which Jesus is about to enter and begin His public ministry. The Evangelist focuses the spotlight on to John the Baptist,

In Advent, the liturgy frequently repeats and assures us, as if to overcome our natural diffidence, that God ‘’comes’’: He comes to be with us in every situation of ours, He comes to dwell among us, to live with us and within us;