27th Day of Lent: March 31, 2014: “The man believed in what Jesus said and left” (John 4:50)

             27^th

              Day 

                    of 

                          Lent:

            March 31, 2014:

     “The man believed in what Jesus  said and left” 

"Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.I believe that what you say it will be."

(John 4:50)

   Trust is a huge issue. How far can we trust a person, Jesus, God, significant person, spouse, siblings, parents, teachers, pilots, drivers, cops, lawyers etc?

 We trust that they will get you want to be, desires to be, and hopes to be? 

To trust in the promises of the Lord that you will live a hundred years old, you will have prosperity all around can be challenging when you see all around you destruction, defeat, devastation, disappointment, distress and decay.

And yet Prophet Isaiah assures the people of Israel that God is creating everything new. Jesus continues to surprisingly show up in the lives of Gentiles and perform miracles and especially creates new life out of death, illness, exclusion, marginalization.

The more I open my eyes to what is right with the world; I am convinced that God continues to deliver his promises.

Sometimes we are blinded by our prejudices and biases that we reject the obvious. It is usually the ‘outsiders who get it’ as in the case of the Gentile royal official who unflinchingly trusts in the word of Jesus.

 Do we have the patience to continue on the journey of our faith despite setbacks, slow downs, disappointments, lack of clarity in the direction our lives sometimes take us?

The goal of spiritual life is not a point of arrival but it is about keep moving, keep walking, keep trusting, keep believing in the promises of the Lord.

As Pope Francis said this morning in his homily don’t be ‘spiritual tourists in your life of faith’.

 God Bless you always!

Sincerely Yours,
Rev. Fr. Cyriac Chandy Mattathilanickal, MS

La Salette Retreat & Conference Center Director

Wishing you and yours A Holy Lent!            

                                                                           Rev. Fr. Tom Puthusseril, M.S.

                                                                           Shrine Director

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amEntTOmwMA

Pope Francis: don't be 'tourists' on the spiritual journey of faith

(Vatican Radio) Where are you on your spiritual journey? Are you wandering aimlessly like a tourist? Have you stopped or lost your way? Or are you heading straight for your destination? Those questions were at the heart of Pope Francis’ reflections during his homily at Mass in the Casa Santa Marta on Monday morning.
Philippa Hitchen reports:  

Reflecting on the day’s readings from Isaiah and St John’s Gospel Pope Francis distinguished between three different types of Christians and how they live their spiritual lives. Before God asks anything of us, the Pope said, He always promises us a new life of joy, so the essence of our Christian life is always to journey in hope and trust towards those promises.

But there are many Christians whose hope is weak and while they believe and follow the commandments, they have come to a standstill in their spiritual lives. Pope Francis said God cannot use them as a leaven among his people because they have stopped and they’re no longer moving forward.

Secondly, he said there are those among us who have taken the wrong turning and lost our way. Of course, the Pope continued, we all sometimes take the wrong road, but the real problem arises if we don’t turn back when we realize that we’ve made a mistake.

The model of a true believer who follows the promises of faith, Pope Francis said, is the royal official from today’s Gospel reading, who asks Jesus to heal his son and does not doubt for a second when the Master tells him the child has been cured. But unlike that man, the Pope said, there are many Christians who deceive themselves and wander aimlessly without moving forward.

These people, Pope Francis said are perhaps the most dangerous group because they wander through life like existential tourists without a goal and without taking God’s promises seriously. But the Lord asks us not to stop, not to lose our way and not to wander through life. He asks us to journey on towards his promises like the official who believed what Jesus told him.

Despite our human condition as sinners who take the wrong turning, the Pope concluded, the Lord always gives us grace to turn back. Lent, he said, is a good time to consider whether we are journeying forward or whether we have come to a standstill. If we have chosen the wrong road, we should go to Confession and return to the right way. If we are a theological tourist wandering aimlessly through life, we must ask the Lord for grace to head off again on the journey towards the promises of our faith.

Text from page http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2014/03/31/pope_francis:_dont_be_tourists_on_the_spiritual_journey_of_faith/en1-786398
of the Vatican Radio website 

26th Day of Lent: March 30, 2014: “I was blind but now I see” (John 9:25)

26^th Day of Lent: March 30, 2014:  “I was blind but                                                            now I see”

             (John 9:25)

The Gospel of John presents Jesus as the light of the world.

Wherever he is and whoever follows him will walk in the light for

he dispels all darkness. 

Jesus enlightens his disciples so that they can see him clearly and follow him closely.

 We see the blind man in the Gospel encountering Jesus and eventually brought to physical sight. Then Jesus gradually leads him to know him to a deeper and deeper insight into the Truth of Jesus.

Seeing Jesus the Light should lead us to living the light. The Spirit of the Lord must have  ‘rushed upon’ the now former blind man just as it did to David. 

He then says being questioned by the Pharisees that Jesus must be a holy man, ‘a prophet for I was once blind but now I see’. The Pharisees were so blind to see the Truth. So they move from sight and light into darkness where as the man is moving from sight into insight. The Pharisees plunged into darkness because their God was in a box according to Cardinal Tagle. They got caught up in the messy details of the law and pronounced Jesus to be a sinner for he violated the Sabbath law. They had fabricated a god according to their own ideas and when God surprises them they cannot accept it as Truth. 

God’s surprises are many in our life and do we have the eyes to see them and having seen it do we draw closer to Him?

The season of lent is when we present our darkness, our

 prejudices, our blindness to the God of light so that he can anoint us with healing balm of forgiveness and plunge us into water of new birth and new life. 

This is so that we may not only receive sight but insight and wisdom to walk in the light of Christ.

 So then we can pray with the psalmist

 “even though I walk in the dark valley

 I fear no evil; for you are at my side that

 give me courage”(Psalm 23:3-4).

God Bless you always!
Sincerely Yours,
Rev. Fr. Cyriac Chandy Mattathilanickal, MS

Wishing you and yours A Holy Lent!

Rev. Fr. Tom Puthusseril, M.S.

Shrine Director

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amEntTOmwMA

25th Day of Lent: March 29,2014: “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18: 13)

25^th 

Day

 of Lent: 

     March 29,2014:  

“God be merciful to me a sinner”                                                                        (Luke 18: 13)

“24 hours for the Lord” is in initiative of Pope Francis presenting himself along with the priests available for the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the Diocese of Rome. The whole world has now seen the Holy Father kneeling himself at the confessional making his own confession to a priest in Vatican yesterday. There is nothing like leading by example.

At the penance service that he presided over at Vatican the Pope insisted on the loving welcome of God:

 “The God who waits for us. God who waits and also God who forgives. He is the God of mercy; he does not tire of forgiving.   

We are the ones who tire in asking for forgiveness, but he does not tire.” 

In his discourse on the internal forum he reminded the clergy that the priests should not be too lax nor too rigorous at the confessional. As a judge the priest must absolve and as a doctor the priest must be a healer. For he said, “But mercy is the heart of the Gospel!

Don’t forget this: mercy is the heart of the Gospel! It is the good news that God loves us that He always loves the sinner, and with this love draws him to Himself and invites him to conversion”.

The tax collector is presented in the Gospel as someone who threw himself at the mercy of God knowing that he does not deserve any mercy from God. The Pharisee is self-righteous and proud of his ‘achievements’ before God as if God needs his sacrifices. As Richard Rohr says “Jesus is never upset at sinners.

He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners”. 

God the Father is waiting for us to return to him and our sure path to holiness is through the confessional. 

So as Mary said at La Salette,

“Come near my children, don’t be afraid”. 

Why should one stay away from confessional after all our God is a God of mercy and forgiveness. 

Let everyone approach the sacrament without fear but be convinced of God’s mercy so as to become ambassadors of mercy.  

God Bless you always!
Sincerely Yours,
Rev. Fr. Cyriac Chandy Mattathilanickal, MS

Wishing you and yours A Holy Lent!

Rev. Fr. Tom Puthusseril, M.S.

Shrine Director

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZJicKiykxU

Our Lady yearns to bring you closer to Her Son, Jesus... Come Near My Child, I have Good News!

24^th Day of Lent:

     March 28, 2014:

 “Love your God...

            and neighbor”

                                                               (Mark 12: 29-30)

I used to have a neighbor who was at daily mass and lead all the novenas and prayers so religiously that everyone thought her to be an epitome of piety.  This same woman was very abusive to her neighbors in words and deeds. I never understood that dichotomy or disconnect between liturgy and life.

Is it not that your life is fed by the liturgy and liturgy fed by life? I believe the reason why Jesus combined two commandments into one i.e. “love the Lord your God with all your heart… and your neighbor as yourself’ is precisely because we cannot really separate these two commandments.

These two loves are like the two sides of the same coin. The First Letter of John takes on this law of love when he says, “If anyone says, ‘I love God’ and hates his brother (sister), he is a liar; for he who does not love his neighbor whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1John 4.20).

In the same vein, St. Catherine of Sienna once heard God tell her, “I have placed you in the midst of your brother and sisters so that you can do for them what you cannot do for me.

That is, you can love them freely without expecting any return”.

 Can we honestly say that I have grown closer spiritually to my neighbors, be it my brother, sister, husband, wife, children, coworker, any one I come in contact with during this season of lent?

As Pope Francis exhorts us in the Joy of the Gospel, “before all else, the Gospel invites us to respond to the God of love who saves us, to see God in others and to go forth from ourselves to seek the good of others.

Under no circumstances can this invitation be obscured” (EG39). In other words, our love for God is result of God ‘pouring his love into our hearts’ as St. Paul tells us, and this love must overflow into our neighbors out of our love for God.

Let this day be one when we pray that someone whom we don’t see eye to eye, the one who is difficult to love, so that we may have the courage to open our hearts to love the unlovable.

Let this law of love get the best of us.

God Bless you always!
Sincerely Yours,
Rev. Fr. Cyriac Chandy Mattathilanickal, MS

Wishing you and yours A Holy Lent!

Rev. Fr. Tom Puthusseril, M.S.

Shrine Director