Word Made Flesh

DO YOU TALK TO ANGELS?

by Fr. Pat McNulty

These last few weeks before our new liturgical year may not be as biblically "flashy" as the Advent-Christmas or Lent-Easter-Pentecost seasons but they are every bit as "fleshy."** And by that I mean down-to-earth human.

Just look at us Catholics! In these final weeks before Advent we have been partying and rejoicing with everybody imaginable.

First we celebrated the Guardian Angels on October 2nd , and there are billions of them. And during October we celebrated the feasts of some of our favorite saints, such as St. Theresa of Lisieux and St. Francis of Assisi.

Then November 1st we celebrate all the saints, from the beginning until now. I doubt we could count them all. Then we take a bit of a breather between midnight Nov. 1st and the morning of Nov. 2nd when we join with all those who have died, all the souls of the departed from the beginning of time until now. How many billions of them are there?

And that leaves us about 19 days to get ready for a really big celebration at the end of November—the last Sunday of our liturgical year when we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King!

Party. Party. Party. And we’re just getting started! What is that all about?

When I was reading the Scriptures for these final Sundays of the liturgical year in preparation for writing this column, I had "a flash in the flesh": what is all this liturgical partying all about, and where is all of that stuff in the Bible?

Well, it’s about sacrament, and it’s all over the Bible.

I can’t tell you how many people I know personally or I have read about, who though well-versed in the Bible, have been attracted to this Catholic sense of sacrament because of what has been revealed to us through the Bible in a most unusual fashion over the centuries.

Because, for us, the very reason for the Bible, is about the Holy Spirit putting flesh on the Word whether in Old Testament times or these New Testament times.

That holy sense of putting flesh on the Word, on Christ and his words, is precisely what we Catholics have in mind when we talk about sacraments and sacramentals (which are related to the sacraments)—-things like water and fire, candles, flowers and figures, that is, everything from life to death and beyond.

The Catholic sense of sacrament is really about following the Spirit, about putting everyday flesh on the Faith. And, you can’t get any more biblical than that. Biblical?

I’m always a bit wearied when I hear people categorically say that Catholics don’t know the Bible. Now I’m not saying that we Catholics don’t need to do a lot of scriptural study and prayer. Nor am I denying that many of our Protestant brothers and sisters put us to shame with their knowledge of Scripture.

But I’m saying that if we Catholics could re-focus on how wonderfully the Holy Spirit has been teaching us to put flesh on the words of the Bible for centuries, we may be surprised how well we "know the Bible."

Let’s try it. Let’s take something very simple and obvious from the Bible and see how the Spirit has taught us.

And remember, when we speak of "knowing the Bible," we Christians are talking about The Word of God which we believe has a hidden life-giving power all by itself. And so, if you reverently and prayerfully dwell on a word that you already know, then the Holy Spirit can show you things you either have forgotten or never saw before.

So, if we start with what we do know and keep it simple, we might be surprised. How about angels, for example?

Angels? Yes, angels. They are biblical to the core! Many people who do not even know the Bible very well know about angels.

So let’s begin with a well known one. How about the Angel Gabriel who was sent to a town in Nazareth to a Virgin named Mary. Now, if you don’t know about that angel then, let’s face it, you don’t know your Bible.

Need a little help? (Smile.)

Angel Gabriel? Angels?

Oh yes. Bethlehem and Christmas.

Ahhhh. And the angels in the tomb at the Resurrection!

Of course.

And how about that guard-ing angel placed at the entrance of Paradise after the Fall?

And, hey! What about the one who was always there in front of the Israelites as they were coming out of Egypt?

(Don’t remember that one? OK. Let’s stay with the angelic CEOs.)

How about the angel named Raphael who did some really weird stuff with a guy named Tobias when Tobias went looking for a wife? That angel is now the guardian of all travelers.

(You mean you don’t follow that old biblical tradition of calling St. Raphael to go with you as you travel? Shame on you! Where’s your biblical sense?)

And everybody knows about the Archangel Michael. Right? Well, you may not specifically remember when Michael first winged into the Bible by name in the Book of Daniel or even Michael’s prominent place in the heavenly battle which is portrayed in Revelation, but if you are Catholic, you have probably heard of this great archangel many, many times.

Remember "The Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel"?

We could go on and on with our angle on the angels. But I think the point is well made: how we Catholics take what is obviously from the Bible and, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, put everyday flesh on it so it becomes a normal part of our biblical life.

No? Then where do you think Catholics get these strange ideas like asking the Archangel Raphael to journey with us as we travel?

And where did we get this wonderful biblical insight that every soul has been given a personal angel to be their guard and guide until they die?

And where did we get this notion of being given power over The Evil One by praying to St. Michael the Archangel? Where? It all comes from our on-going Pentecostal experience through the Word of God, through the Bible.

It is this marvelous Catholic "thing" of being led by the Spirit to flesh out some of the awesome meanings of the Word in what I like to call "sacramental flashes."

Angels are but one of many examples of the ways the Holy Spirit teaches us how to do this.

Yes, it is true that for us Catholics our primary biblical life is in and through the Eucharist with its own biblical focus and then our "fleshed" experience of the Word in the sacraments.

But the Holy Spirit didn’t stop there. The Spirit went on to introduce us to what we call the sacramentals.

Sacramentals are all over the Bible in some form or other as the People of God in every age press on into the Kingdom. People of Word and Sacrament use everything from angels to candles, from fire to water, from flowers to figures, from life to death and beyond to give life to our biblical life, to put flesh on the words.

And even when Time comes to an end, in a flash, we will rise from the dead in the flesh, with a new body, new senses, new eyes and ears.

And, if the book of Revelation is any sign, we are going to see and hear biblical things in the flesh that no eye has ever seen or ear heard.

One of the great gifts of our Catholic tradition is that until the End comes, we can already live like that in these wonderful, powerful, biblical ways which put flesh on the Word of God in the most ordinary ways.

So, let us not be ashamed of the simplicity of our biblical life or forget its power made evident in so many ways throughout the whole liturgical year, in our sacraments, and in the sacramentals.

Many people whom I have known personally or have read about have hungered for this gift of being able to see the Bible in everyday flesh. And once they saw it they could not live without the beauty of a sacramental church.

Do you realize and use the sacramental gifts you have with which to see and hear the Bible in your everyday life. Really?

How long has it been since you talked to an angel, travelled with one or, for that matter, implored his intercession?

Our great saints did it all the time. How biblical can you get?

**In this article, the word "flesh" is used, not in the sense of "ungraced human nature" but in its simple meaning of "body," "skin," and everyday corporeal life.

I COULD NOT LIVE WITHOUT IT

by Cheryl Ann Smith

In October 2004, we entered a year dedicated to the Eucharist and its relationship to the Church. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of my entrance into the Roman Catholic Church.

My First Communion was not when I was a little girl. (As a child, I had watched the little Catholic girls in white "bridal" dresses from the window of my Protestant home and wondered what the heck was going on).

My "First Communion" was when I was eighteen years of age. It was quite "illegal", but it changed my life!

The story began when, in a dramatic conversion experience, God poured his love into the marrow of my being. In the space of a few radiant minutes, I journeyed from not being sure if God existed or knew me, to exulting in a profound union with my Beloved Lord.

I didn’t know how my life would unfold after that, but I did know that I wanted nothing more than to live in this union of love with God.

A month after this experience, I met and fell in love with a wonderful Catholic man, who introduced me to his Church. I will never forget the first time I ventured into a Catholic church with Jacques.

It was overwhelming. At first, I thought this was because the Church was so full. I wasn’t used to statues, stained glass windows, candles, or an altar. But in time, I realized that it was the Blessed Sacrament that so overwhelmed me, the Blessed Sacrament which filled the church with the presence of Jesus.

The more I accompanied Jacques to Mass, the more I realized that Communion would bring me to that point of unity with God that I had experienced in my conversion experience. And I wanted that—badly.

I also realized that the Eucharist was sacred—not something to be taken lightly. So I resolved to study and pray for three months, to prepare myself to receive Jesus in Communion at the Easter Vigil Mass.

Since no one told me I shouldn’t receive Communion without being in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church, I happily and assiduously prepared my heart. And in his tender mercy, God honored the desire of my soul.

I don’t remember anything of that Easter Vigil Mass except receiving a jolt of spiritual electricity as I received my Lord and my God in the Eucharist for the first time. For hours I felt a tingling penetrating my body and soul and later on even permeating my bedroom.

I experienced that night that the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of my Lord and Savior. After that no one would ever be able to convince me otherwise. And I knew I could never again live without it.

My first Communion was, in a sense, the continuation of my conversion experience.

For the next year and a half, I continued to receive Communion, but without joining the Catholic Church. That blissfully ignorant liberty came to an abrupt halt when I came to Madonna House for my first visit. There I was told, kindly but firmly that, as a Protestant, I was not permitted to receive the Eucharist.

The reason lay in the sad division in Christianity. Except in exceptional circumstances, I was told, the Catholic Church did not permit this, because for Protestants to receive Communion would imply a oneness which does not yet exist and for which we must all pray.

To say I was devastated would be putting it mildly! I had feasted on God for these many months, and now I was suddenly cut off! More than ever, I knew that the Eucharist was my food and drink and life. I could not live without it.

What an excruciating two-week visit!

As soon as I returned home, I contacted my university’s Catholic chaplain. I received a few instructions in the Catholic faith, and within a couple of months, I was told I could make my Profession of Faith thus entering the Catholic Church.

Then a week before the great event, I was told that my Protestant family and friends would not be given a dispensation to receive Communion at that liturgy.

All the hurt, anger, and rebellion I had experienced towards the Catholic Church at Madonna House swept back in a great tidal wave, threatening to drown me.

Why did the Catholic Church bar someone from receiving Jesus in the Eucharist, I asked myself angrily, if the person truly believed in his Presence there? (Obviously, I had not accepted the explanation I had been given at MH.)

A blackness descended upon me as questions and murmurings swirled in my heart and mind.

Then I began to realize that I couldn’t just use the Church to get what I wanted, which was the Eucharist. The Eucharist belongs to the Church, is protected by the Church, is of a whole with the Church.

Could I be a faithful member of the Church, even if I didn’t understand all her teachings? Could I accept Our Lady, even if I hadn’t met her? Could I say "yes" to the whole of the Catholic Church and not just the Eucharist?

And how could I become a Catholic with these unresolved issues?

I was too inexperienced to know that this spiritual darkness was in part my "temptation in the wilderness." But as I cried out in desperation the night before my Profession of Faith, God gave me a tool of discernment that I have clung to ever since.

That night God taught me not to discern his will solely through my thoughts and emotions. Yes, I was to listen to all that my humanity was telling me, but then I had to beg for the grace to plunge deeper—to dive underneath the tumultuous waters of my conflicting thoughts and emotion. For only then would I be able to hear what God was saying in my heart of hearts.

When I finally was able to do that, I knew what God’s will was. His will was for me to join the Catholic Church and to eat freely and drink deeply of his Real Presence in the Eucharist.

And I needed to trust that he would gradually fill in the gaps, so that my fiat, my surrender to him, would be more and more true.

The next night, as I made my Profession of Faith, my face was as radiant as a bride’s. I was a bride of Love, and my first legal communion was our wedding night.

God was faithful. As my thirty years as a Catholic unfolded, I have been falling more and more in love, not only with Jesus present in the Eucharist, but also with Jesus present in his Church—the Church which safeguards and offers him in the Eucharistic Feast.

My Story

THE HOLE WHERE GOD SHOULD BE

by Cathy Mitchell

There never was a time when I didn’t know Madonna House. My oldest sister, Mary Beth, became a staff worker about four months before I was born, and when I was a child, my family vacationed in the Combermere area. So I grew up knowing lots of the staff.

Madonna House was a nice place to visit, but I knew that I never wanted to live there.

I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s when both the Church and the society were in a lot of turmoil. Even the name of the religion class in my Catholic school—"Man in Society" gives an idea of what things were like.

I picked up all the disillusionment, restlessness, and sense of emptiness of the time, and I found it hard to get a grasp on who God is or to have a relationship with him.

As a teen I wasn’t very interested in God or the things of God. Nothing could satisfy me or hold me for very long, and I was generally unhappy.

To give you an example, I’ll describe my experience of Christmases.

I enjoyed buying presents especially for my other sister’s children. Then we’d all go to Midnight Mass, and come home and open presents. On Christmas night I loved sitting in the dark with just the lights on the Christmas tree. But as I did so, I felt a deep emptiness after the fullness of the day. I remember sitting there in the dark and asking myself, "Is this all there is?"

I struggled a lot at home and left when I was about seventeen. For a while I worked at a friend’s clothing store a few hundred miles away. But I soon realized that I needed to go back and finish high school. I did that and graduated and went to university for a year. But that same emptiness was still there.

So I left university and traveled for a year with a friend. It was a really carefree time. We traveled down the east coast of the U.S. and slept on the beaches in Florida for a while.

Then we traveled further and ended up in Houston, Texas, where we ran out of money. So we got jobs with a construction crew.

It was in the late ‘70s when Houston was having an oil boom, so there was lots of money to be made.

Thousands of people were moving to Houston, and it was an exciting time to be there. But though I was meeting a lot of people and having a good time, I wasn’t really happy. That emptiness was still inside me.

At the same time I noticed that not everybody was making money from the boom. Houston is near the Mexican border, and there were a lot of Mexicans working there illegally. Several were working at the same construction site as I was, and whereas I was making six dollars an hour, they were just making two.

From time to time vans with immigration officers would come and the "illegals" would be rounded up and driven back to Mexico. Then the next day, many of them, having traveled all night, would be back at work.

But I decided that I would not let this reality get into my consciousness and affect me.

I wasn’t working in construction too long when my sister Mary Beth wrote and told me that Catherine Doherty was coming to Houston to give a talk.

I wasn’t going to church at the time, and though I wasn’t interested in hearing her talk, I had always loved Catherine and wanted to see her. So I decided to invite her out for dinner. I left a message for her at the hotel where she would be staying.

When she phoned me, all she said was, "Darling, come and see me." Something broke in my heart and I just started sobbing.

But Catherine’s time was really booked. Her hosts were proud of all that was happening in the city—all the new buildings going up, the first megamall in the U.S., and so forth—and they took her around to see it all. But Catherine could see the dark side of the boom; she saw the poverty and suffering.

It turned out that Catherine didn’t have time to go out to dinner with me. So she invited me to go to her talk instead and told me, "We’ll talk afterwards."

So I went. It was a huge lecture hall, and when I walked in I saw Catherine up front surrounded by people. Fr. Brière was there, too, off to the side. So I walked up to him and said, "Hi, Fr. B. How you doing?" He said, "You’re running away from God." I said, "Oh, it’s nice to see you, too." We chatted a bit.

Then Catherine gave her talk. She talked about 45 minutes or so and I can’t tell you what she said.

What I remember, and remember powerfully, is that at the end, she looked like she was in anguish. Grabbing the sides of the podium, she shouted, "Wake up! Wake up! Your brothers and sisters are dying in the streets, and you have your two cars and your three television sets."

Her words were like a knife that went into my heart. Then she started to collapse.

Fr. Brière and another priest ran up and got her to her seat. Then Fr. B tried to explain to everybody what had happened. All through her time in Houston, he told us, she was experiencing a confrontation with evil. She was experiencing the struggle between the culture of life and the culture of death.

Afterwards I went to her. We chatted a bit and then she said, "Sweetheart, get out of Houston. It’s a wicked city. Come to Madonna House."

This changed my life, and I quit my job. But I suffer from what I call "the Jonah Syndrome." When confronted with something difficult to face, like Jonah, I just want to run away.

So I left Houston, but instead of going to Madonna House, I went to California. It wasn’t quite Nineveh, but almost.

I liked California and decided to finish college there. I knew I could get into UCLA; so I decided to go back to Houston to get my things, which I had left there, and then go back home to Ontario to get my school records.

Then while I was at the airport in Houston waiting for my plane with some friends, I kept noticing people with little black smudges on their foreheads.

My first reaction was, What are all those people doing with those black smudges on their foreheads? (I still wasn’t going to church.) Then it hit me. Oh, it’s Ash Wednesday!

I was horrified at myself that I was so away from the Church that I didn’t know it was Ash Wednesday. It struck me so hard, in fact, that I consider that day as the day of my conversion.

Well I got home to southern Ontario and was working here and there to get enough money to go back to California. Easter was coming and my mother told me she was going to MH for Easter. Did I want to go with her?

I said yes. That way I could go, thank Catherine for her invitation, spend a nice time there, and then go live my life the way I wanted to.

The Easter liturgy was beautiful and then on Easter Monday, a visiting priest who had been at MH for a six months visit and was about to leave said the Mass and gave the homily.

He said that he had been struggling and had seriously considered leaving the priesthood. He had tried a lot of "helps" but nothing worked.

Then he heard about Catherine Doherty and her love for priests and decided to visit Madonna House. He said, "There I finally realized that my problem was that God wanted me to put all my eggs in one basket, and I was so afraid that he would drop the basket."

That word went right into my heart, and I started sobbing. For I suddenly knew that God wanted me to put all my eggs in his basket, too!

Then that Jonah Syndrome kicked in again, and I left the next morning. But as soon as I got back home, I knew that I had to find out what it was that God had hit so deeply in me. So I returned to Madonna House and stayed through the summer.

At the end of that time my spiritual director said to me, "You have to make a choice. Are you going to leave, or are you going to join Madonna House?"

I heard somebody say, "I’m going to join Madonna House." Who said that? I was the only one there besides the priest, and I couldn’t have said that!

But I had, and it had come from a very deep part of me, the part that had awoken when I heard Catherine’s cry to wake up.

And though fear filled me at the thought of living the Madonna House vocation, what filled me even more was joy, the joy that I had been looking for.

As time went on I realized that the emptiness I had been trying to fill with so many things had been an emptiness in the spot where God should have been. So when I could say yes to God, it gave him permission to come in and fill me.

Like the merchant in the Bible who was searching for fine pearls, I had found the pearl of great price.

COMBERMERE DIARY

by Paulette Curran

Our biggest news story for this month is an ordination. Or should I say, "a double ordination"?

For on September 4th two of our members were ordained Kieran Kilcommons to the diaconate and Denis Lemieux to the priesthood.

Many friends and relatives came to celebrate with us, and it was a day filled with pride, love, joy, and gratitude.

Fr. Denis’ parents and numerous members of his extended family came—most of them from the area of Alexandria, Ontario—and Kieran’s mother and stepfather traveled all the way from Alberta.

Add to these, faculty and classmates from St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto, priests from our diocese, families who know Fr. Denis from their time at our Cana Colony, associate priests, staff from our three nearest mission houses, and numerous friends of MH.

Well, the crowds filled not only the chapel but the chapel of repose behind it and the porch as well.

Now picture one bishop, 39 priests, and 9 deacons processing in to the Mass.

Each of the rites of ordination (to diaconate and priesthood) has several parts and occurs in the context of Mass. These rites include the preliminary ceremonies of the presentation and acceptance of the candidate by both bishop and people and the promise by the candidate of respect and obedience to the bishop.

The words throughout are very beautiful. The candidate to the priesthood, for example, is told, "Share with all mankind the word of God which you have received with joy. Meditate on the law of God, believe what you read, teach what you believe, and put into practice what you teach."

Then while the candidates prostrate themselves before the altar, the Litany of the Saints is sung.

Then comes the very moving "Laying on of Hands," the very essence of the ordination, the moment when a man becomes a priest.

Bishop Richard Smith, the bishop of our diocese of Pembroke, ordained Denis by the laying on of hands. Then, one by one, each of the priests prayed over Fr. Denis. As each priest finished, he went and stood around the altar and continued to pray with uplifted right hand.

It was an awesome time. One could sense the Lord inserting Denis into the body of the priesthood and the priests accepting him with loving support.

Fr. Denis said afterwards that during this time, he could not see the faces of the priests. As each one prayed over him, he saw only the stoles Fthe hand-woven stoles of the MH priests, the stoles given to his classmates by St. Augustine Seminary, and the varied stoles of the others. In his heart all the priests merged into one Priestt Christ. It was Christ himself that he experienced as ordaining him.

After this, first Deacon Kieran and then Fr. Denis were vested with the stole and the robe of their new states. It was moving to see their parents taking part in this vesting.

After the Mass there was a reception, but Fr. Denis missed most of it! Already he was forgetting his own needs and desires in the service of God’s people. During his reception he gave first blessings for two hours straight.

Of course there was a festive supper and "after supper remarks." (We were told that they wouldn’t be long enough to be called "speeches.")

And since Fr. Denis’ article "But It’s Just a Potato!" had just appeared in the September issue of Restoration, some of these remarks referred to potatoes. When Fr. Denis, in response to a question as to how he was feeling, responded, "I feel like I’m being watched by everyone," Susanne Stubbs, acting director general of women, said, "The watching is in the order of wonder and awe that the brother who was peeling potatoes with us last night is now a priest of Jesus Christ. And the beautiful thing about our priests is that you might well be peeling them again with us tomorrow night…. I thank God for the gift of faith, which enables us to believe that Denis is transformed into Fr. Denis."

Then in his remarks thanking various people, especially his parents and family and the priests of MH, Fr. Denis thanked the staff, from whom he had "learned everything I know through scrubbing potatoes and peeling carrots!" The staff, he said had shown him "in a million little ways" the incarnated love of Jesus Christ and the Gospel lived out.

Then the next day, Sunday, Fr. Denis celebrated his first Mass. What a joy this was! Two images stand out in my mind: Fr. Denis’ look of playful joy as he sprinkled us with holy water, and our elderly Archbishop Raya with his head bowed on the altar in prayer as Fr. Denis was getting ready for the consecration.

And now Fr. Denis (after spending a few days with his family in Alexandria) and Deacon Kieran are into their ordinary lives. Kieran is back at the seminary for his last year, and Fr. Denis has just begun his new one-year assignment—as a parish priest in the cathedral in Pembroke.

But our celebration of new life was not over. Just four days after the ordinations was September 8th, the day we accept applicants (our equivalent of novices) into our community. And this year the new applicants were accepted by three new director generals.

This year there are five applicants: three men—Jean-Pierre Baril, Jeremy Heynen, and David Thomas—and two women—Marie-Eve Pouliot and Mariya Shymonovych.

David is from England, and Mariya from Ukraine.

(Don’t be surprised if you hear that we are getting more Ukrainians. When Mariya heard that after our statue of Our Lady of Korea arrived, lots of Koreans came here, she gave us a beautiful icon of Our Lady of Kazan.)

The ceremony for the reception of applicants is simple and includes the presentation of the "brown folders," which contain our treasures: some of the essential writings of Catherine Doherty, our foundress, in which she presents the spirituality of our apostolate.

Mark Schlingerman, director general of men, in his explanation of the significance of the brown folder, read a letter, which our foundress Catherine wrote in 1968.

In it she describes the folders as "my will to you" because "not having any earthly possessions, this is all I can give you." The applicants, she said, were to think of it "as a visit with me, even though I might have passed on into God’s arms."

And now the applicants, too, are into their new ordinary lives. This includes living in a separate house, being trained in various kinds of work, and applicant classes. But in many ways their ordinary lives are the same as the ordinary lives of the staff and guests.

And these days, as most days, that life is very busy. The big push in September and October is harvesting and food processing. It is a time when our life whose spirit Fr. Denis caught so well in his articles about potatoes and carrots (cf. also Restoration, February 2004, p. 3) is especially involved with fruits and vegetables.

But, in fact, aren’t these the essentials of any life? In Madonna House, the men produce the food and the women prepare it. And the priests feed us with the Eucharist.

As long as we have food, our bodies will live. And as long as we have the Bread of Life, our souls will live.

Fr. Denis Lemieux has other connections to Restoration besides his numerous articles. He was circulation manager for five years and editor for four.

The Pope’s Corner

THE HEART OF THE WORLD

by Pope John Paul II

Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to share with deep emotion, as a means of accompanying and strengthening your faith, my own testimony of faith in the Most Holy Eucharist.

Here is the Church’s treasure, the heart of the world, the pledge of the fulfillment for which each man and woman, even unconsciously, yearns.

A great and transcendent mystery, indeed, and one that taxes our mind’s ability to pass beyond appearances. Here our senses fail us. Yet faith alone, rooted in the word of Christ handed down to us by the Apostles, is sufficient for us.

Allow me, like Peter at the end of the Eucharistic discourse in John’s Gospel, to say once more to Christ, in the name of the whole Church and in the name of each of you: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life (Jn 6:68).

At the dawn of the third millennium, we, the children of the Church, are called to undertake with renewed enthusiasm, the journey of Christian living.

As I wrote in my apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, it is not a matter of inventing a new program. The program already exists: it is the plan found in the Gospel and in the living Tradition; it is the same as ever.

Ultimately it has its center in Christ himself, who is to be known, loved, and imitated, so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity, and with him transform history until its fulfillment in the heavenly Jerusalem."

The implementation of this program of a renewed impetus in Christian living, passes through the Eucharist.

Every commitment to holiness, every activity aimed at carrying out the Church’s mission, every work of pastoral planning, must draw the strength it needs from the Eucharistic mystery and in turn be directed to that mystery as its culmination.

In the Eucharist we have Jesus, we have his redemptive sacrifice, we have his resurrection, we have the gift of the Holy Spirit, we have adoration, obedience and love of the Father. Were we to disregard the Eucharist, how could we overcome our own deficiency?

Excerpted from the conclusion of the encyclical, "Ecclesia de Eucharistia"(The Church and the Eucharist).

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE KING

by a staff worker

In my pre-Vatican II childhood, my Catholic grandmother prepared me for church attendance. She told me that "we don’t cross our legs in church." She told me to take off my hat, and not to chew gum, put my hands in my pockets, or speak out loud in church.

She told me that this was for the sake of humility and reverencing him who suffers and patiently waits for me in the tabernacle. This was child training in appropriate behavior, grandmother-style, in a past era.

Somewhere else, perhaps in school, I heard that there are "countless hosts of angels" always kneeling before Christ in the tabernacle.

I remember the high altar in our parish church, and the tall candles and the statues of angels adoring before the tabernacle. Going to church was like visiting the palace of a king. It was awesome!

Somehow the silence and all those things grandma insisted on made sense amidst the stained glass depictions of the lives of the saints and the majestic brass organ pipes stretching heavenwards. Yes, even the little child that was me was reduced to silence upon entering such splendor with his grandmother.

Many things, of course, are different now. But gestures and postures, though not all necessarily the same as they used to be, are still an essential part of preparing our bodies, souls, and psyches to enter into holy space and holy actions.

There is a story I’ve heard about a teacher and a child. The teacher asked the child, "Why do we make the Sign of the Cross before we pray?" The child replied, "That’s how you dial God’s number."

I think kneeling is like that. It’s like taking the phone off the hook in preparation for dialing a friend or calling for help.

Entering the church, we enter into the presence of the King of kings. So we greet the King before taking our places in his presence. We assume an appropriate posture, an attitude of mind and body respectful to him. We genuflect.

Then entering the pew, we assume another appropriate posture. Kneeling tells the body, as well as the heart and soul that we are going into prayer mode. It says, pay attention. It fosters an interior attitude conducive to a prayer type conversation, a dialogue, with the King.

Experience has also shown me that kneeling helps one to stay awake.

Another physical thing, looking, also helps. Looking at the tabernacle or the monstrance or a statue or picture helps us to pay attention to Jesus. How can we daydream while kneeling and looking Jesus in the eye, so to speak?

It is also a way of saying to Jesus that we are paying attention. (Do you ever get annoyed at someone you’re talking with when he or she keeps looking over your shoulder?)

In heaven, we are told, countless hosts of men and angels kneel before the throne of the God who made them. I want to be counted among them some day. But I can join with them even now by kneeling before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

All Saints Day

WHAT WILL HEAVEN BE LIKE?

by Fr. Emile-Marie Brière

What comes to your mind when you think of heaven? What ideas do you have about life in heaven?

Those saints and angels, will they be interesting, pleasant, fun to associate with? Will people like St. Peter, the Little Flower and St. Anthony have any use for the likes of me? Will I be able to talk with St. Thomas Aquinas, or will I feel like an ignorant crumb?

And the clear vision of God—what will that be like? To know as I am known. Will that be delightful? Or frightening?

Will I be able to look upon the face of the living God without dissolving into the dust from whence I came?

What exactly heaven will be like we don’t know. But we do know some things. St. Paul, for example, tells us that eye has not seen nor ear hears… all that God has prepared for those who love him (1 Cor 2:9). So heaven must be full of delights, of wonders ever renewed, of magnificent discovery followed by magnificent discovery.

We will be drawn out of ourselves, for one thing, and that must be one of the greatest joys of all!

We also know that heaven is a place where love rules supreme, a place where we will be loved and able to love perfectly.

We will be in ecstasy at the sight of the beauty, goodness and loveableness of God, and also at sight of the beauty of each person there.

How do we know that the saints HSt. Francis Xavier, St. Thomas More, St. Theresa of Lisieux, St. Bernadette Soubirous, for example—will be our friends? We know that they will because no one can enter heaven who is not a lover.

They see now with pure eyes the immense loveableness of each person. So they can love me.

As a matter of fact, not only can they love me (if I’m there, that is, and I sure hope to be), but they can’t help loving me.

And I don’t have to wait for that love. Today, right now, the angels and saints love me. They’ve "made it" and they long to see me "make it" too.

Even now we can communicate and get to know each other. Even now the grace that is in me, by the mercy of God, attracts and delights them. For they see the beauty in the soul of each Christian. They are eager for its growth, for its full flowering, for the sight of its full beauty.

No, the saints are not frightening or boring or censorious or self-righteous. They are lovers. They love me even as I am—weak, inclined to sin, struggling with my selfishness. They enjoy my company. They like to talk with me. As a matter of fact, they even like me!

And not just me, but you and you and youAall of us as we struggle with the selfishness in us and all around us, and as we turn to God for healing and strength. Now isn’t that a pleasant thought, a very pleasant thought?

Heaven is a placed where nothing exists but love. To live in heaven is to live in a continual state of love.

Yes, heaven will be joyous, ecstatically joyous. We will be filled with excitement by everything and everyone we see.

We will be awed by the fact that all this joy has come through the cross of Christ. And we will sing (even those of us who can’t sing now) unrestrained praise to the Lord with everything that we have and are.

Did you know that heaven can begin now? In fact, it ought to. In heaven we will see the goodness, the beauty and the loveableness of God, Our Lady, the angels, and the saints And we will see the goodness, the beauty and the loveableness of each person we meet.

Why not try to see, with the eyes of faith, all of this now, especially in the people we live and work with. Let’s practice now. Otherwise we may have to spend time in Purgatory learning how to do it.

And why not believe now in the immense love of God which will delight us for all eternity?

He is the same today, this infinitely loving God by whose mercy we, too, can become lovers.

He desires nothing more than that we begin to live right now, upheld by his transforming power of love, the life he has waiting for us for all eternity.

Fr. Brière died on June 16, 2003. Too bad he can’t write another article about heaven now!

Adapted from The Power of Love, pp.139-141, available from MH Publications.

MH Toronto

A TRAVELLING PRAYER CARD

by Elaine Dalton

For some years now Fr. Jim Duffy, the MH priest at this house, has been praying with people a prayer he wrote, a shortened form of the Act of Consecration to Our Lady.

"Mary, dear, you are my Mother. Please take my hand and tell me where to go, who to see, and what to say. Please don’t let go of my hand, Mary dear, because I need you, and I will always love you. Amen."

Two years ago, some generous benefactors offered to get copies of it printed for distribution, but they didn’t say how many. To our amazement, a supply of fifty thousand arrived at our house!

However, it was not too many. In the spring of 2003, along with a supply of MH books, informational material about MH, and Restoration, Fr. Duffy and I brought copies of the card to the Atlantic Marian Gathering in Moncton, New Brunswick. There they quickly disappeared.

Throughout the following year, repeated requests for them came from those who had attended that conference, and we mailed out many hundreds.

A second printing of two hundred thousand copies was made!

Since then many hundreds of these prayer cards have disappeared from the various MH book tables that we have been bringing to various events, such as the Peterborough and Toronto Lay Symposiums and Lift Jesus Higher rallies.

This year for the Atlantic Marian Gathering, which was held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (PEI), Fr. Duffy and I brought over 8,000 copies and every last one was taken!

Soon after that, we received an urgent request from a town in New Brunswick for 8,000 copies which the person wanted to give, along with rosaries and medals, to a priest returning to northern Ghana. We sent them by courier.

Another time a friend of ours dropped by for lunch with a friend of hers, a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal, who was home for a visit from a mission in Honduras. He left here with a large supply of MH books and thousands of the little prayer cards.

A member of an organization called Friends of the Poor (lay associates of the Missionaries of the Poor), whose founder is Jamaica’s Mother Teresa, took away another 8,000 to share at a meeting of their group and of other missionaries returning to India, the Philippines, Uganda, and other countries in Africa.

Then a woman in PEI, inspired by Fr. Duffy’s powerful proclamation that "the rosary will save this island" initiated an island-wide perpetual rosary novena. Saying that the time for the Consecration is ripe there, she requested four hundred of the little cards.

And another parcel will soon head west to a rural area of Manitoba.

With the assistance of Canada Post and FedEx, Our Lady is reaching out to her children across the world.

ONE MAN’S SCRAP

People often ask us why we of Madonna House beg. Here’s how our foundress Catherine answered that question in a letter to the staff in 1962: "We beg because we are in love with a Beggar who is God. Love does such things; it cannot resist doing so.

"Those of us who fall in love with God feel impelled by faith and love to imitate him, to identify ourselves with him, to become one with him, to be poor like him, depending daily on utter trust in our Beloved."

For all these years we have tried to live in this trust in God’s Providence by begging for our needs, and he rewards this trust by moving the hearts of others to help us. He has never left us in need.

One of the ways in which we do this is to come to you each month in this column to give you a glimpse into our day-to-day life and to tell you of our needs.

This month we are asking for help with two special projects. One is the organizing of material for Catherine’s cause, a project for which we need 81/2 x 11 hanging file folders.

The other one is in the music department, which is asking for 11/2 inch thick three-ring binders. Our hymn books are a collection of song sheets which we have put together into these binders, and many of the ones we have are cracking from daily use.

The music director, Veronica Dudych, also needs legal-size (18 inches wide) hanging file frames for organizing the song sheets. She has lots of folders and only needs the legal size frames.

The carpenters, who have just about finished the new sorting building—we have already done a couple of sortings in it—are asking for 16-foot measuring tapes, Robertson screw drivers, T-50 staples (1/4 inch and 3/8 inch), and 8-inch sanding disks.

Thank you for the bars of soap and shampoo that you have been sending. The only grooming items that we are low on at the moment are disposable razors and plastic fingernail brushes.

And since our dining room floor can only be washed with Murphy’s Oil Soap, we would welcome a bottle or two of it.

Vintage costume jewelry has become very popular in our mission shop, especially rhinestone pieces. So if you have any rhinestone or other vintage pieces that you can give us, the gift shop staff would be happy to receive them. And our customers are also asking us for vintage perfume bottles, hatpins, cosmetic cases, and so forth.

We are grateful for all you send, for each item contributed and sold adds to the funds we can distribute to the poor.

The men in our apostolate who look after maintenance want to thank everyone who sent batteries. Now they need rough service flight bulbs, shrink tubing for electrical repairs, 20" x 20" by 1" furnace air filters, and handlebar baskets for bicycles.

It has been a bad allergy season, and the nurses report that our supply of antihistamines has dwindled. Can you send us some? Other over-the-counter meds needed are: cough medicines, decongestant, expectorant, or combinations of these, liquid Gaviscom or the equivalent, Immodium for diarrhea, and rubbing alcohol.

Our faithful office workers, Mary McNamara and Doreen Rousseau, are asking for #10 envelopes and for 8 1/2 x 11 white paper and what we call "good-on-one side paper" that is, paper that still has one good side, which we use for scrap paper.

The other office need is re-enforcement rings for notebook paper holes, an item which seems to be in high demand by several departments these days.

In November, we, like you, remember in a special way those who have died. In this month of Holy Souls let us take joy in knowing that our deceased family members and friends are united with each other and with us in a bond that is stronger than death—the Communion of Saints. And each day Mass is offered by one of our MH priests or associate priests for them and for you.

My Dear Family

THE KISS OF CHRIST

by Catherine Doherty

I was so astonished when I found out that people were afraid of confession. Who is afraid of being kissed by Christ? Who can be afraid when he knows that he is held tenderly in the hands of Jesus Christ?

I think that the wrong idea of sin is deeply ingrained in so many people. People are literally afraid when they talk about sin. Sort of a panic gets hold of them.

Sin seems to be sort of a mirror that changes them. Like a carnival midway, you look in one mirror and you are fat, you look in another mirror and you are thin.

Well the idea of sin seems to change a person. They think of themselves as ugly, unpleasant, unloveable, because they say to themselves that they are sinful.

Then the spiritual malady, spiritual fear, translates itself into a psychological fear. Which means that we just believe we are unloveable.

Well, let’s look at sin. First, I wish that all Christians thought of themselves as saved sinners, because that is what they are.

The Lord died on a cross, the Lord resurrected and ascended. What for? To save us. To reconcile us with his Father. Isn’t it nice to be a saved sinner?

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The Russians consider confession "the kiss of Christ." It is Christ’s kiss of peace, of forgiveness.

When I was a young girl, my mother said, "Catherine, it’s time for you to go to confession and be kissed by Christ." Isn’t that a nice introduction for a child?

So I would go to church, kneel before a priest, and tell him my thoughts.

But in my imagination it was much more than that. My mother very gently and simply explained it. I had committed a fault and knew that God wouldn’t like it. So I sort of ran towards him and, sitting on his lap and putting my arms around his neck, I would kiss him like I did my fatherland tell him how sorry I was for having done something he didn’t like.

In my imagination Christ hugged me and said something like, "that’s all right, little girl. I know it’s not easy to always do the right thing."

Then he would kiss me and bless me and say, "Now go and play."

I realized that when you grow up, you receive another kiss. You sin and say, "I’m sorry." Slowly a strange face that nobody knows and yet everybody knows, bends down and touches mine, and I experience the words of the Song of Songs, Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth (Song 1:2)

Well, this is what confession is. In a sense his lips touch yours, and fire and flame enter your heart and cleanse the sin.

Yes, confession is Christ’s kiss of peace, of forgiveness. It’s a simple thing, not very complicated. Perhaps the way my mother taught me stayed with me. I was never afraid to go. Always, before my eyes were the love and forgiveness of God and his immense mercy.

Many people have rejected confession; they are not interested. They don’t go there very much. What they miss! They miss being kissed by God.

I always feel a little sad when people don’t go to confession often, because they miss so much.

Above all, they miss a kiss from Christ.

Excerpted from Kiss of Christ, pp. 14, 15, 19, 20, available from MH Publications.