April 11: St. Gemma

O God, Who fashioned thy servant Saint Gemma into a likeness of Thy Crucified Son, grant us through her intercession the favor that we humbly request, and through the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Thy Son, may we be united with You for all eternity. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
 
Saint Gemma, pray for us.

Desire

“Our desire for God is nothing compared to his desire for us. He loves us and desires us infinitely more than we can desire and love him. Our desire can have highs and lows, but God‘s desire to love us can never diminish or be extinguished. Despite our infidelity and lukewarmness, God will always want to love us, give himself to us, to save us.

“And it is this desire of his that can awaken and stimulate ours. We must believe in it, offer ourselves to it, without ever becoming discouraged in the face of our destitution. We must believe that God wants to wed us in spite of our ugliness and, believing, allow him to do it. It is he whose gaze will make us worthy and clothe us in beauty.” ~Fr. Jacques Philippe, excerpt from The Eight Doors of the Kingdom: meditations on the beatitudes (p. 137)

Divine Mercy Sunday

“Today, fixing our gaze with you [Saint Faustina] on the face of the risen Christ, let us make our own your prayer of trusting abandonment and say with firm hope: ‘Christ Jesus, I trust in you!’” ~Pope John Paul II on the occasion of the canonization of Sister Faustina Kowalska on April 30, 2000

Divine Mercy Sunday

“Our desire for God is nothing compared to his desire for us. He loves us and desires us infinitely more than we can desire and love him. Our desire can have highs and lows, but God‘s desire to love us can never diminish or be extinguished. Despite our infidelity and lukewarmness, God will always want to love us, give himself to us, to save us.

“And it is this desire of his that can awaken and stimulate ours. We must believe in it, offer ourselves to it, without ever becoming discouraged in the face of our destitution. We must believe that God wants to wed us in spite of our ugliness and, believing, allow him to do it. It is he whose gaze will make us worthy and clothe us in beauty.” ~Fr. Jacques Philippe, The Eight Doors of the Kingdom: meditations on the beatitudes (p. 137)

Easter Saturday

“I will go anywhere and do anything in order to communicate the love of Jesus to those who do not know Him or have forgotten Him.” ~St. Frances Xavier Cabrini

Easter Friday

“Fellowship means among other things that we are ready to receive of Christ from others. Other believers minister Christ to me, and I am ready to receive.” ~Watchman Nee

Easter Thursday

“It will not do … to say that Jesus’ disciples were so stunned and shocked by his death, so unable to come to terms with it, that they projected their shattered hopes onto the screen of fantasy and invented the idea of Jesus’ ‘resurrection’ as a way of coping with a cruelly broken dream. That has an initial apparent psychological plausibility, but it won’t work as serious first-century history.

“We know of lots of other messianic and similar movements in the Jewish world roughly contemporary with Jesus. In many cases the leader died a violent death at the hands of the authorities. In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. ‘Resurrection’ was not a private event. It involved human bodies. There would have to be an empty tomb somewhere.

“A Jewish revolutionary whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest himself, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. We have evidence of people doing both.

“Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was.”~N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

Easter Wednesday

Luke 24:13-35

“In the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ we see who we are called to become as we grow in continual communion. In this encounter with the Risen Lord, made present at every Eucharist because it is outside of time, we receive the grace we need to begin to walk the road of our daily lives differently because we have seen the Risen Lord! He walks with us on our own road to Emmaus. We learn to recognize Him, in the breaking of the bread.” ~Deacon Keith Fournier

Easter Tuesday

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

“[Mary Magdalene] wanted to clasp those sacred feet again and remain there in loving contemplation, but Jesus said to her gently: ‘Do not touch me.’ Without doubt the Lord reveals himself and gives himself to the soul that seeks Him, but at the same time he always remains God, the Most High, the Inaccessible: ‘Do not touch me!’ Although admitted to divine intimacy, the soul should not lose the sense of the transcendence of God, and of the infinite distance that lies between the creature and the Creator, between the one who is not on the One who is. Thus, the nearer the soul comes to God, the more it realizes this infinite distance, and together with confidence and love, there is born in it a profound sentiment of reverence for the supreme majesty of God.” ~Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene, O.C.D.

The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Easter Monday

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

“If, then, it is by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ that death is trampled underfoot, it is clear that it is Christ himself and none other who is the Arch-victor over death and has robbed it of its power. Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and resurrection of his body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ who mounted on the cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally.” ~St. Athanasius

The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!