Good Counsel Day 3

 Your counsel to us extends back to your earthly life when you spoke of your Son, commanding us: “Do whatever He tells you.” 

. . . For an increase in love, trust, and devotion to your Immaculate Heart that leads us to Jesus, pray for us.

Day 3, Novena to Our Lady of Good Counsel

Courtesy of the La Salle Brothers

She is indeed a star (that) enlightens, guides, and leads us to a harbor in the stormy sea of this world. She is this clear and brilliant star rising above this great and spacious sea, shining by her merits and enlightening by her example.

You have without a doubt a need for light in this life, where you are always as if upon a stormy sea, at the risk of your salvation.  Have recourse to Mary.  She will enlighten you and help you know God's will for you because she shares in the light of Jesus Christ her Son. She herself is a light shining in the darkness.

John Baptist de la Salle

Meditation 164: Meditation on the Holy Name of Mary

Meditations

If we could lift the veil, and if we were attentive and watchful God would continually reveal Himself to us, and we should see His divine action in everything that happened to us, and rejoice in it. At each successive occurrence, we should exclaim: 'It is the Lord', and we should accept every fresh circumstance as a gift of God. 

Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade

Abandonment to Divine Providence

Good Counsel Day 2 (On Heroic Patience)

 True devotion to Our Lady is holy; that is to say, it leads the soul to avoid sin and to imitate the virtues of the Blessed Virgin, particularly her:

1.  Profound humility 
2.  Lively faith
3.  Blind obedience 
4.  Continual prayer
5.  Universal mortification
6.  Divine purity
7.  Ardent charity 
8.  Heroic patience
9.  Angelic sweetness and 
10.  Divine wisdom. 

These are the ten principal virtues of the most holy Virgin.

St. Louis de Montfort

True Devotion to Mary

You have provided counsel and comfort to those who needed you, even during your earthly life when you visited your cousin Elizabeth while she carried John the Baptist in her womb. Our Lady of Good Counsel, today, I ask for your intercession for a world in need of your guidance and for counsel in my own life . . . (especially) (f)or counsel for those who are exiled from their home countries, pray for us. 

Day 2

Our Lady of Good Counsel Novena

Master M S 
The Visitation (1506)
Hungarian National Art Gallery

And we are all exiles. Despite appearances to the contrary and our own feeble attempts at preservation, this world is passing away. We are but pilgrims stumbling on a path to our heavenly home country. There is "nothing new under the sun." 

And still we sing:

"This Earth will one day melt like snow,

The Sun refuse to shine.

Yet God Who sent me here below,

Will be forever mine.

He'll be forever mine."

Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)

BYU Noteworthy

Isaiah 40:31

They that hope in the Lord will renew their strength,

They will soar as with eagles' wings;

They will run and not grow weary,

Walk and not grow faint.

 

Good Counsel Day 1

Blessed Mary, Star of the Sea, guide us now as you have guided pilgrims in years past. Be our constant beacon, a blazing light in this dark night, and lead us home to dwell with your Son forever and ever.

Novena to Our Lady of Good Counsel

Mary, Star of the Sea (Anonymous, 19th-Century)

As the Scholastic Era developed, several important theologians supported this meaning of Mary’s name. St. Bonaventure says for instance, “This name is most fitting for Mary, who is to us a star above the sea. She guides to a landfall in Heaven those who navigate the sea of this world…Well do we compare Mary to a star of the sea, because of her shining purity, her brightness, all that she does for us.” St. Thomas Aquinas endorsed this understanding of Mary’s name, saying, “Thus the name ‘Mary,’ which is rendered ‘Star of the Sea,’ suits her, because just as sailors on the ocean are guided to a harbor by a star, so Christians are guided to glory by Mary.”

Bede

"The Virgin Mary as Star of the Sea"

Owlcation

How many more have been led to the practice of the highest virtue by interior trials! Who can measure the degree of heroic virtue saints like St. Ignatius, St. Teresa or St. Francis de Sales attained by this means? We must consider it the action of a Providence unceasingly attentive to the welfare of His children, who feigns to abandon them in order to rouse them from slumber or increase their humility, self-distrust and self-renouncement, their confidence in God, submission to His will and perseverance in prayer. Hence instead of allowing ourselves to become discouraged and fainthearted under trials which may seem to overwhelm us, let us act in the same way as we do when our bodies are sick, consult a good doctor—a good spiritual director—and applying the remedies he advises, patiently await the effects that it pleases God to give. Everything is meant for our good, and such trials ought to be counted as special graces from God.

Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure

Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence (p. 74)

 

Surrender

 You can have it all Lord . . . This heart that is not Yours. 

1 Chronicles 29:11-13 

(11)Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, 

And the glory, and the victory, and the majesty; 

For all that is in the heavens and in the earth is thine; 

Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, 

And thou art exalted as head above all. 

(12) Both riches and honor come from thee, 

And thou rulest over all. 

In thy hand are power and might; 

And in thy hand it is to make great and to give strength to all. 

(13) And now we thank thee, our God, 

And praise thy glorious name.

 

A Knight's Vigil (John Pettie, 1884)

Holy Wednesday

 By not letting things creep into the garden out of fear (this was man’s first mistake, not eating the apple.) You shamar (or "guard" the garden God has given you) by bringing everything to light and not hiding anything from Him. Your identity is rooted in surrender to the Father, accepting that you can’t do life without Him. Your masculinity is determined by how well you listen to the Spirit. Your worth comes from the Cross.

from "Men: You Are Not Your Job . . ."

-Tanner Kalina

Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness.

-Mother Teresa of Calcutta

“A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.”

-St. Basil

" . . . (O)ur neighbor’s spiritual need transcends every commandment. Everything else we do is a means to an end. But love is an end already, since God is love.”

-St. Edith Stein

Forged Day 4 - Purified for Strength, A Heart Lifted Up

 The reasons for forging:

• Softens the metal so that the master blacksmith can shape it
• Removes impurities from the metal
• Strengthens the object while it is molded by rearranging the grain structure

Fear is not enough of a motivator in such a difficult task. Only the call to love is, so we must fight desire with desire. 

What do I want my life to look like 10 years from now? How would I be with new habits in place of my old ones?

Consecration Through Joseph Day 1 - My Identity as Child of the Father

 What is it, then, for our hearts to rest in God?

Our adopted sonship with the Father occurs through our union with Christ . . . The journey toward union with God is the story of our human development. God initiates and invites us into this journey, and then accompanies us along the way and provides everything we need to keep going. Through Christ, he unites to our humanity, and our humanity can return to Him through Christ. This means we enter fully into the humanity of God through the door of the humanity of Christ. 

Greg Bottaro and Jen Settle   

Consecration to Jesus through Saint Joseph: An Integrated Look at the Holy Family

p. 11 -12

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."

Mathew 1:23

God has become human so as to be able, in all completeness, to live with us and die with us. We have found in Jesus a fellow human being who is so completely one with us that not a single weakness, pain, or temptation has remained foreign to him. Precisely because Jesus is God and without any sin, he is able to experience our sinful, broken human condition so thoroughly that we may say he knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us more than we love ourselves.

No one else, however well disposed, is ever in a position to be with us so completely that we feel ourselves to be understood and loved without limit. We humans remain too self-centered to be able to forget ourselves fully for the other person's sake. But Jesus does give himself fully, he holds nothing back for himself, he wants to be with us in so total a fashion that we can never again feel alone. Jesus is the compassionate God who comes so close to us in our weakness that we can turn to him without fear.

Henri J. M. Nouwen

"Jesus: God With Us"

from Advent Expectations