All Saints Day Meditation: Solemnity of All Saints

Tomorrow is the Solemnity of All Saints, commonly called All Saints Day.  It is normally a holy day of obligation but in my neck of the world, since it falls on a Saturday this year, we are excused from the obligation.  Still we are having a special Mass at my parish for those who wish to attend.  Last year we had Cardinal Dolan come in to celebrate the display of relics our pastor, a great collector of relics, placed in cabinets situated about the Church.  https://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/2024/11/faith-filled-friday-all-saints-day-at.html  There will not be a special celebrant this year, but we will celebrate All Saints through those same relics.  It will be special. 

The Gospel passage for All Saints Day is the same every year, the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel.

 

Here is the Gospel passage.

 

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain,

and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.

He began to teach them, saying:

 

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,

for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the land.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the clean of heart,

for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,

for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you

and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.

Rejoice and be glad,

for your reward will be great in heaven."

~Mt 5:1-12

 

This is a beautiful explanation of what All Saints Day is and why we celebrate it, put together by the YouTube channel, Catholic Saints and Feasts.

The one homily I will embed will come from Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington DC speaking on the heroic virtues of St. Dominic de Guzmán.

 

To pray, to bless, to preach!

 

All Saints Day Meditation: "The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint."  (French Catholic novelist Leon Bloy)

 

Let us honor one of the new saints recently canonized in the last few months, one that is ideal with today’s Gospel, the “Man of the Beatitudes.”

“Jesus comes to me every morning in Holy Communion, and I return the visit in the poor.”  -St. Pier Giorgio Frassati.

Meditation on the Feast of the Assumption: The New Ark

This has been a different Feast of the Assumption than normal for me.  About ten days ago I noticed that my mother’s pulse oximeter was reading a resting pulse in the 120’s.  She had not been feeling well for a while, and I was stumped as to why.  My first thought was that there was something wrong with the oximeter.  So I took out the blood pressure machine and measured her pressure, and there too the pulse was wildly high.  I did it a number of times to convince myself that it was true.  Her resting pulse was ranging from 105 to 125, and never slowing down.  I called the pacemaker doctor and made an appointment for weeks out.  He also had me activate a machine that communicates with the pacemaker and then sends the data back to office.  Later that day I received a call from their technician to pull up the appointment to the nearest opportunity.  That nearest opportunity was two days later.

That appointment was last week.  After interrogating the pacemaker, he found that my mother had been in A-Fib for three weeks, and there was no sign of it correcting.  He scheduled an Electrical Cardioversion procedure.  Someone described it to me as if stopping the heart and zapping it back up.  I don’t know if that is quite true, but they do zap the heart with electricity.  That procedure was scheduled and performed today, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  I thought it quite coincidental that my mother might actually be dead for a second and brought back to life on the bodily assumption of Christ’s mother. 

It all went well.  She came right out and her pulse was a steady 70, and has been since the procedure.  Let us meditate on the Assumption.  First, today’s Gospel reading.

 

 

Mary set out

and traveled to the hill country in haste

to a town of Judah,

where she entered the house of Zechariah

and greeted Elizabeth.

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting,

the infant leaped in her womb,

and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit,

cried out in a loud voice and said,

“Blessed are you among women,

and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

And how does this happen to me,

that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears,

the infant in my womb leaped for joy.

Blessed are you who believed

that what was spoken to you by the Lord

would be fulfilled.”

 

And Mary said:

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior

for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed:

the Almighty has done great things for me

and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him

in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,

and has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,

and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of his servant Israel

for he has remembered his promise of mercy,

the promise he made to our fathers,

to Abraham and his children forever.”

 

Mary remained with her about three months

and then returned to her home.  

~Lk 1:39-56

 

That is one of my favorite passages in Luke.  Dr. Scott Hahn beautifully explains the Biblical basis for the Assumption of Mary. 

 

The Blessed Mother, carrying Jesus in her womb, is the new Ark of the Covenant!

 

Meditation: “And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”

 

For the hymn, let’s go with the lovely “Immaculate Mary.”

 

Let me take this moment to thank God for today’s outcome with my mother’s procedure.  And to thank all my friends who helped pray with me for this outcome.

Meditation for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

Today is Ascension Thursday, forty days after the Resurrection.  As I’ve read, only the dioceses of Boston, Hartford, New York, Omaha, and Philadelphia have in the United States today as a Holy Day of Obligation.  More than likely if you are reading this, the celebration of the feast for you is pushed over to Sunday.  Well, after some early confusion, I realized I had to get to Mass today, and I did.  It was worth it.  The readings are wonderful.  Today’s Gospel is taken from Mark’s Ascension narrative.

 

Jesus said to his disciples:

“Go into the whole world

and proclaim the gospel to every creature.

Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved;

whoever does not believe will be condemned.

These signs will accompany those who believe:

in my name they will drive out demons,

they will speak new languages.

They will pick up serpents with their hands,

and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.

They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

 

So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them,

was taken up into heaven

and took his seat at the right hand of God.

But they went forth and preached everywhere,

while the Lord worked with them

and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.

~Mk 16:15-20

This is the famous snake handler passage.  Do not do this.  People have actually died following this.  How is one supposed to read it?  It’s a sign of the power of evangelizing, not the literal prevention from harm.

More importantly, Fr. Geoffrey Plant provides the theological underpinnings of the Ascension.

 

The Glory Cloud is the key to the passage! 

 

Meditation: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.”

 

 

Faith Filled Friday: From Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati

This is a wonderful meditation as a Lenten meditation.  It comes from a letter by Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati on what makes a truly profitable life.  I quote it from the February 2023 edition of Magnificat.

If you have not heard of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, his life is a must to learn.  He came from a rich, well-connected Italian family who secretly helped the poor with his time and money from a young age.  Whatever money he was given, he gave it away.  He was a mountain climber, a student of engineering, a Third Order Dominican, a passionate Catholic, a lover of the Eucharist, a lover of Christ, and he did all this before contracting a form of polio which killed him at the age of twenty-four.  He perhaps lived out the beatitudes as well as any young man could do.  Wherever he went, his joyful smile made friends.  I think of his as the saint of friendship.

I don’t know who he wrote this letter to, but it encapsulates the essence of his Catholic point of view.

 

May peace be in your soul….Every other gift which one possesses in this life is vanity.  It is wonderful to be alive inasmuch as our true life is the life beyond; otherwise who could bear the burden of this life if there weren’t a prize for suffering, an eternal joy; how could one explain the admirable resignation of so many poor creatures who struggle with life and often die in the breach if it weren’t for the certainty of God’s justice?  In the world which has distanced itself from God, there is a lack of peace, but there is also a lack of charity that is true and perfect love.  Maybe if all of us listened more to Saint Paul, human miseries would be slightly diminished….

 

My life is monotonous, but every day I understand better what a grace it is to be Catholic.  Poor unlucky those who don’t have faith: to live without a faith, without a patrimony to defend, without a steady struggle for the truth, is not living but existing.  We must never exist but live, because even through every disappointment we should remember that we are the only ones who possess the truth, we have a faith to sustain, a hope to attain: our homeland.  And therefore let us banish all melancholy that can only exist when the faith is lost.  Human sorrows touch us, but if they are viewed in the light of religion, and thus of self-surrender, they are not harmful but helpful, because they purify the soul of the little and inevitable stains by which we men, due to our wicked nature, dirty ourselves many times.  In this holy Lent, let us lift up our hearts and always go forward for the triumph of the reign of Christ in Society.

 

Cordial greetings in Jesus Christ.

 

            -Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati

 

From Magnificat February 2023

 

From Letters to His Friends and Family, Father Timothy E. Deeter, Tr., 2009, St Pauls Alba House, Staten Island, NY.

 

For a young man, he knew the range of human experience: “Human sorrows touch us, but if they are viewed in the light of religion, and thus of self-surrender, they are not harmful but helpful, because they purify the soul of the little and inevitable stains by which we men, due to our wicked nature, dirty ourselves many times.”  I don’t know how old he was when he wrote that, but there is no way I could have envisioned that in my twenties. 

Let me close with his ending exhortation: “In this holy Lent, let us lift up our hearts and always go forward for the triumph of the reign of Christ in Society.”

Here is a little film clip of his life.

 

I hope he is finally canonized in my lifetime.  He is someone I really admire.