Day: February 16, 2016

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Wednesday, 17 February 2016 : 1st Week of Lent, Memorial of the Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order (Psalm)

Liturgical Colour : Purple/Violet

Psalm 50 : 3-4, 12-13, 18-19

Have mercy on me, o God, in Your love. In Your great compassion blot out my sin. Wash me thoroughly of my guilt; cleanse me of evil.

Create in me, o God, a pure heart; give me a new and steadfast spirit. Do not cast me out of Your presence nor take Your Holy Spirit from me.

You take no pleasure in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, You would not delight in it. O God, my sacrifice is a broken spirit; a contrite heart You will not despise.

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Wednesday, 17 February 2016 : 1st Week of Lent, Memorial of the Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Purple/Violet

Jonah 3 : 1-10

The word of YHVH came to Jonah a second time : “Go to Nineveh, the great city, and announce to them the message I give you.” In obedience to the word of YHVH, Jonah went to Nineveh. It was a very large city, and it took three days just to cross it. So Jonah walked a single day’s journey and began proclaiming, “Forty days more and Nineveh will be destroyed.”

The people of the city believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. Upon hearing the news, the king of Nineveh got up from his throne, took off his royal robe, put on sackcloth and sat down in ashes.

He issued a proclamation throughout Nineveh : “By the decree of the king and his nobles, no people or beasts, herd or flock, will taste anything; neither will they eat nor drink. But let people and beasts be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call aloud to God, turn from his evil ways and violence. Who knows? God may yet relent, turn from His fierce anger and spare us.”

When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, He had compassion and did not carry out the destruction He had threatened upon them.

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Tuesday, 16 February 2016 : 1st Week of Lent (Homily and Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : Purple/Violet

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we heard about God Who came into this world to bring it to salvation, and we heard about God Who is indeed our loving Father, Who always look down at us from heaven above, and He Who does not abandon us in times of distress. God is our Father, Who cares for us all just as all fathers care for their children.

God does not let us all to suffer alone in the darkness, and He Who created us with love, wants all of us to be reunited with Him and to be gathered back into His embrace and into His presence, no longer scattered and lost, but reunited and be freed from our bonds of sin and from our attachment and defilement by wickedness and by the darkness of this world.

And through Jesus, God had made His love evident and real in this world. He was the Son of God, Whom He had granted to the world, that all of us mankind might be saved through His works and intercession. And Jesus then showed us all how to pray to our Lord and Father, Who is always listening to us and to our petitions and words, because He is indeed longing to speak with us, to converse with us and to communicate with us.

And in this season of Lent, all of us should spend more time with our Father in heaven, praying to Him and speaking with Him, spending our moments with Him and withdrawing ourselves for a while from the daily business and the daily occupations we had, that we may discern and reflect from our encounter with the Lord in prayer. That is the problem with many of us, that we have spent way too short a time in prayer.

But whenever we pray, do we pray in the proper way, brethren? Or were our prayers filled instead with litany of wishes, petitions, desires, wants, or even demands? This is what our prayers tended to be, and many of us might even have the misconception that when we pray, we are asking the Lord to do us a favour, or even that He would listen to us and grant us what we asked of Him.

That is why when we do not get what we wanted, then we become angry at God, and we even abandon Him for some other things which we think as those that can provide us with what we wanted. But this is not what we ought to be doing, brothers and sisters in Christ. In this season of Lent, a season of renewal, repentance and forgiveness, it is a time for us to understand what it truly means to pray to our Lord and God.

To pray to God means to open ourselves, our hearts, minds and entire being to God, so that He may come in us and speak deep in our hearts. God is always trying to contact us, to touch us and to impact us with His words, and He desires always to communicate with us, for that is what prayer is, that is communication between us and God. And just as in our communication with each other, we talk and at the same time also listen to another person we are talking to, we should be doing the same with the Lord our God too.

That is why we should see how our Lord Jesus prayed to His Father in heaven, which we know now as the Lord’s Prayer, or the Pater Noster, the prayer addressed to God Who is our Father. When we pray, we should first give glory to God, and thank Him for all the blessings which we had received from Him, and even if we are in the direst and the most difficult of moments, we should still always be thankful for the very life which He had given to us.

Let us all rediscover our faith in this time, the time of mercy and forgiveness, and let us approach our Lord, God our Father, and spend more time with Him, communicating and talking with Him in prayer, a pure prayer not made up of our petitions, wishes and wants, but rather a prayer of the love and desire which we have to be loved by our Lord, and to receive His everlasting mercy.

May God bless us and strengthen our resolve to lead an ever more righteous life in this season of Lent and beyond, and may He keep us strong in our faith as always. May He keep us on the path to salvation and everlasting life. Amen.