Category: Behold Vancouver

Today, Fr. Mark-Mary guides us through discernment for how to hear the Father’s voice more clearly this Lent through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

Are you afraid to approach God?

Jesus says, “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them… But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.” Matthew 6:5-6 

Fr. Mike reminds us that God sees us, notices us and cares for us. Don’t be afraid to approach the throne of grace.

“My God, my God why have you abandoned me?” Psalm 22:1 Are you praying everyday but still suffering? Are you doing all the right things but your heart is still broken?

Fr. Mike shares with us today that God doesn’t promise all our desires, but promises that He will be with us through our sufferings. He reminds us that we are never abandoned by Him.

You need to know yourself in order to find the best ways to live Lent. Take some time to consider who you are and what your relationships need.

It’s important to know yourself well when you decide how you will fast, pray, and give alms this Lent.

If you do, then maybe you can combine all three in ways that are tailor-made to improve the most important relationships of your life.

Let’s start with your relationship with God.

We all have a different problem here. 

Maybe you are overwhelmed. Are you exhausted by your many devotions? Maybe you do rosaries, chaplets, and novenas  — and rosary novenas and chaplet novenas —  along with daily Mass, feast day activities, daily podcasts, and parish events, and you’re drowning in it all.

Or maybe you are presumptuous. Maybe you do all of those things and you actually keep up with it all. Your inbox provides the novena for next week’s feast each morning, you are on the second half of a 54-day rosary novena, you get a chaplet in most afternoons at around 3, and you are going through Bible in a Year for the third time. Maybe you are pretty sure that even God is impressed with you.

Or maybe your spiritual life is on hold. Maybe you did many of these things for much of your life, but you are just really, really busy right now. You totally plan to pray again — when you have more time. Maybe in late spring?

Whether you are overwhelmed, presumptuous, or on hold —  you can do something about it this Lent. Give up worrying about anything but daily prayer, Sunday Mass, and regular confession — but put more into each of those. At your daily prayer, picture Jesus sitting across from you, lean forward, and say, “Can we just talk for a change?” He would love to hear from you.

Then comes your relationship with your spouse.

Again, let’s be clear where we are starting. 

Are you walking on eggshells with your spouse? Maybe you’re fine, totally fine, as long as you can steer the conversation away from two or three or, well, maybe 10, touchy topics that set you off. If you talk about any of those you get angry fights or silent funks. So you don’t talk about those. And you’re fine.

Are you being maternalistic or paternalistic with your spouse? Maybe your husband complains that you don’t let him do anything he likes and that you shut down every plan he tries to make — but of course you do because his priorities are all wrong. Or maybe your wife complains that you don’t listen to her — but you most certainly do listen, on the rare occasions she actually has something important to say.

Do your Lenten practices feel arbitrary? Do your penances seem ineffective? If you’re feeling this way, you might be wondering, “what do you want from me this Lent, God?” 

You might hear the answer as you receive cruciform ashes on your forehead this Ash Wednesday: “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.” 

Fr. Mark-Mary wants you to transform your Lent with one simple idea: repentance. There is a better way to do this, and it’s not complicated. We hope you have a blessed Lent this year!

©AscensionPresents

Lent is often a time when we are invited to pray the Stations of the Cross, a devotion that has multiple lessons we can learn about the spiritual life.

One of the most popular devotions during Lent is the Stations of the Cross. Parishes around the world will hold special times when the faithful can come to the Church and pray the Stations together.

It is a devotion that simply “makes sense” during Lent, as it is focused on the intense passion and death of Jesus Christ.

The Directory on popular piety and the liturgy explains that it is a “synthesis” of various Lenten devotions:

The Via Crucis is a synthesis of various devotions that have arisen since the high middle ages: the pilgrimage to the Holy Land during which the faithful devoutly visit the places associated with the Lord’s Passion; devotion to the three falls of Christ under the weight of the Cross; devotion to “the dolorous journey of Christ” which consisted in processing from one church to another in memory of Christ’s Passion; devotion to the stations of Christ, those places where Christ stopped on his journey to Calvary because obliged to do so by his executioners or exhausted by fatigue, or because moved by compassion to dialogue with those who were present at his Passion.

While it certainly is focused on Jesus’ passion, the Directory notes four additional lessons that we can learn from it.

1. Life as a Pilgrimage

The Directory explains that the Stations of the Cross can open us up to the idea of, “life being a journey or pilgrimage.”

When praying the Stations of the Cross, it is common to move from one station to the next. This physical movement is sometimes made even more dramatic when praying at outdoor stations that wind its way up and down a hill.

Our life is a journey, a pilgrimage, that will be difficult at times, but will lead us to our ultimate home.

2. Preparation for Heaven

Connected to the previous lesson, the Stations can remind us that our life is “a passage from earthly exile to our true home in Heaven.”

Life can be difficult and Jesus’ passion puts this suffering on full display. When praying the Stations we can reflect on our own lives and how the many sufferings we experience prepare us for our true home.

3. Uniting ourselves to Jesus’ Passion

The Stations have an obvious lesson of igniting within us “the deep desire to be conformed to the Passion of Christ.”

While we may not always feel a great inner desire to be united to Jesus’ Passion, the Stations are a reminder to us that Jesus invites us to be with us at the cross.

There’s something special about Mass on Ash Wednesday — Catholics everywhere scramble to find a church and a Mass time so they can fit it into their day.

If you’re Catholic and walking around with a clean forehead on Ash Wednesday, you kinda feel like you went to work without your pants. But at the same time, when you do have ashes on your head, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that you’re a walking billboard for religion.

It’s a confusing day to be Catholic. If we’re supposed to “pray in secret” as Jesus commands in the Ash Wednesday Gospel reading, is it really a good idea to paste something on our foreheads to tell the world that we’re practicing our faith? On the other hand, when you see someone at the deli counter wearing their own smudge of ashes, you can give them a silent nod with the knowledge that you’re in this thing together and that’s pretty cool.

Perhaps Ash Wednesday is an important day for Catholics of all types because those ashes signify our participation in a community that’s walking toward God together. Even for those who haven’t been to Mass in ages, receiving and wearing those ashes is an important outward sign of an inward reality: we’re all part of this family.

There’s more to Ash Wednesday Mass than just the ashes, though. If it were just about smudging foreheads, they’d have a drive-through lane next to the church! When you’re at Mass on Ash Wednesday, here are three things to notice beyond the ashes.

1. Standing in line

When we walk forward to receive ashes, we walk in a line, just like we do to receive Communion. This line is a great equalizer — rich and poor, young and old, Yankees fans and Red Sox fans — we all walk in the same line toward one destination. Many stand in front of us, many stand behind.

It’s not a bad image for why we turn to faith: we walk together toward the table where God meets us, and then we return to where we came from. We’re all poor and hungry in line for a meal. We come and we go, together.

We can think of Mass as a beating heart, drawing us in, sending us out. When we join this rhythm, we’re restored and renewed as we approach the altar, and then we are sent out to take that nourishment to others.

That doesn’t mean that every time we come to Mass, we have an earth-shattering epiphany, or even an emotional experience. It just means that we come to Mass to connect our lives to God’s life in ordinary ways.

How to fight the battle for our souls — and win.

If you knew you had to fight for your life, would you want some time to prepare for that struggle? How would you spend that time? Surely, you would want to spend some of that time choosing suitable weapons and defenses, and you would want to learn how to use them well.

Most of us will never have to fight for our physical lives, but all of us are in a fight — right now — for our souls.  Every human soul is a battleground between the grace of God and the evil of the fallen world, fallen flesh, and the devil. The season of Lent is a time to be vividly reminded of that constant, often hidden conflict. In an earlier column, I described Lent as a time to get serious about confronting the evil within us and the evil around us.  In my last column, I wrote about how to discern whether we are fulfilling or failing Lent’s purposes.  This week, let’s look at the tools needed to fight Lent’s battle — the battle for our souls — and win.

The three traditional Lenten disciplines are prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Saint Peter Chrysologus taught that “prayer knocks, fasting obtains, mercy receives.” How can we take that wisdom to heart for Lent, and let those disciplines become our arms and armor for the constant battle for our souls?

Let’s start with prayer. Jesus never said, “Pray more” or “Pray better.” He did teach us to pray always. (Luke 18:1) To pray is to enter consciously and deliberately into the presence of God. Jesus was faithful unto death because He knew that He was always in the presence of our Heavenly Father, even when He did not feel that presence.

If you had the opportunity to be constantly in the presence of a father who loved you absolutely, would you take it? But we all have that opportunity! We are all always in the presence of our Heavenly Father Who loves us perfectly. During this Lenten season, find the answer to this question: “What would my life look like if I really believed that I am always in the presence of my Heavenly Father, Who loves me absolutely?” Then live according to the answer to that question — whether you feel like it or not. To “pray always” means to “practice the presence of God.” 

What about fasting? So many people seemed caught up in parsing the minutiae of what constitutes a fast and what does not qualify as a fast. Those considerations are not irrelevant, but they are not paramount.

Valentine’s Day celebrates the life of St. Valentine of Rome, a priest who was martyred on February 14.

February 14 marks the popular holiday of Valentine’s Day, a day to show your love to someone special in your life.

The reason it is called Valentine’s Day is because the Church used to celebrate the life of St. Valentine on this date.

Who was St. Valentine?

February 14 honors the memory of St. Valentine of Rome, a priest who was martyred on this day in the year 270.

A brief biography of St. Valentine is featured in Butler’s Lives of the Saints.

Valentine was a holy priest in Rome, who, with Saint Marius and his family, assisted the martyrs in the persecution under Claudius II. He was apprehended, and sent by the emperor to the prefect of Rome; who, on finding all his promises to make him renounce his faith ineffectual, commanded him to be beaten with clubs, and afterwards to be beheaded, which was executed on the 14th of February, about the year 270. 

Generally speaking, this is most of what we know about the real St. Valentine with any certainty. After his death many legends were composed about him. One of the earliest legends about his life is featured in the Golden Legend.

When St. Valentine was brought in a house in prison, then he prayed to God, saying: “Lord Jesus Christ, very God, which art very light, illumine this house in such wise that they that dwell therein may know you to be very God.” And the provost said: “I marvel that you say that your God is very light, and nevertheless, if he may make my daughter to hear and see, which long time hath been blind, I shall do all that you command me, and shall believe in your God.” St. Valentine put him in prayers, and by his prayers the daughter of the provost received again her sight, and all they of the the house were converted. After, the emperor cut off the head of St. Valentine, the year of our Lord two hundred and eighty.

It wasn’t until much later that St. Valentine was associated with lovers, and the invention of the modern-day celebration of Valentine’s Day. Even the story of St. Valentine performing marriages comes at a later date.

Regardless of these later additions to this story, the early Christians venerated St. Valentine of Rome as a holy martyr, who stayed faithful to Christ despite persecution.