Un Pacto de Amor – Retiro para parejas
26-28 de septiembre del 2014
Viernes 6:30pm hasta 2:00pm el domingo.
Presentado por: César Prada
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Scripture:
Deuteronomy 26:16-19
Matthew 5:43-48
Reflection:
What’s the difference between a contract and a covenant? This is something I discuss with couples I meet with in preparing them for marriage. As I explain to them, a contract is a civil agreement between two persons, and a covenant in the spiritual sense is an agreement between two persons and God. We hear about the covenant God established with the Israelites today in the first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. The covenant called for the people to observe all of the statutes, commandments and decrees, and to hearken to the voice of God. They are reminded that if they do this, they will be favored in God’s eyes and sacred to the Lord.
God enjoins upon us this same covenant promise. If we but follow the commandments, decrees, etc and walk in the footsteps of God, we will enjoy a lasting relationship with our God. How difficult can this be? In one sense it seems so simple, just do what God asks us to do and we’ve got it made! True to form, being the frail human beings we can be, we often make the simple to be the most difficult!
Each year during Lent, we set out to be the people God created us to be! We slip and fall, pick ourselves back up time and again and start over. God as our loving parent, is always there to pick us up again and again, to remind us of the great love that surrounds us and makes this parent/child relationship so powerful and perfect!
Matthew offers words of advice in his gospel today in regards to just how we can strive to be faithful to the covenant. We are called to heed the law of love,
“love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children
of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes
rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”
This requires a willingness on our part to lay down our weapons of jealousy, envy, pride, stubbornness, impatience and quick judgment. It requires us to embrace our brothers and sisters as members of the one family of God. We can’t do this if we view our relationship with God as a mere contract, something we do by ourselves devoid of any spiritual assistance from our loving God.
May our Lenten journey lead us into an ever-deepening covenant relationship with a God who loves us unconditionally and promises us a share in that perfect if we but follow that path set before us.
Theresa Secord is a Pastoral Associate at St. Agnes Parish, Louisville, Kentucky.
Scripture:
Reflection:
Another chance, another opportunity…it never stops with God…
Jesus’ debate with the crowd following the exorcism of the demon that made a man mute (11:14-16) continues. Jesus was reaching out to people outside Jewish borders. If you are the Messiah, you should be concerned only with us. They demand a sign from heaven! Instead of giving them a sign, Jesus reminds them of the story of Jonah.
First day into Jonah’s (must I say, ‘reluctant’) preaching and everyone believes, proclaim a fast and repent, yes even the king! They repent and God relents…he doesn’t destroy. He forgives. How powerful! Much to his dislike, Jonah was a sign of God’s inexhaustible mercy to the Ninevites…the outsiders.
Each year as we enter into the season of Lent, we are invited to ponder on the mercy and compassion of God for us. This is a season of Grace. The call to repentance is a call to look at everything in a new light. Lent reminds us that our God is a God of life and not of death. It reminds us that if we truly believe and repent, God embraces us in the warmth of his mercy and compassion.
It’s not easy to be forgiving and loving to people who have wronged us. It’s difficult to reach out…to take that first step. God’s compassion for us is a bitter-sweet reminder to be compassionate to people in our lives. For sure, we carry a little bit of Jonah in us!
Fr. Bruno D’Souza, CP, is on the staff at Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center, Sierra Madre, California.
Scripture:
Isaiah 55:10-11
Matthew 6:7-15
Reflection:
Prayer is such a stretch for our poor human nature! To say prayer is difficult would be the understatement of the centuries. “No one can come to me unless my Father Who sent me drag him.” John 6:44 The Church directs us to start the Divine Office with: “Open my lips and I shall declare thy
praise”. In other words I must pray to be able to pray! It should never surprise us that prayer can be terribly hard. When we pray we are totally over our head.
What a consolation today’s gospel is for us. Jesus steps in and tells us how to pray. “Pray in this way.” Mt 6:9 “Father” is the first word of prayer. St Paul of the cross was noted to be saying the Rosary as an old
man by two seminarians as they went by to shop. They were away for two hours and coming back to the monastery notice the old saint still saying his rosary. “Father Paul, how many rosaries have you said?” The old man looked down at his beds and said: “I am still on my first Our Father!” To be wrapped in amazement and wonder when we say Father for two hours is how the great ones prayed! What an astonishment to see how fond God is of us! “But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret.”
It is still more a shock to realize how immense this loving Father really is in the heavens. One never comes to fully appreciate Jesus if our God is too small. In the first line of Our Lord’s great prayer He plunges us into the affection and greatness of our God. When we look through our telescopes and see over 200 billion galaxies, should we not be staggered when SS tells “Do I not fill heaven and earth”! Jer 23:24
Would it not be wonderful if we could linger a couple of hours on this first line of the Our Father? Praise to Christ who taught us how to pray! Prayer is indeed the greatest stretch of our lives, but if we let our brother Christ guide us it will also be the greatest act of our lives!
Fr. Bob Weiss, C.P. preaches Parish Missions and is a member of the Passionist Community in Louisville, Kentucky.
Scripture:
Leviticus 19:1-2, 11-18
Matthew 25:31-46
Reflection:
How vivid are my memories as a child after reading the life of one of the great saints of the Church! How often I would find myself thinking, “O Lord, I want to be holy too. Help me to be holy Lord!” And so would go the musings of an idealistic young fellow who believed that it could really and truly happen. “If I really try, then one day I will be holy just like the saints are!” I never doubted that this could happen, not for a moment. And I still believe it to this day.
On this Monday of the first week of Lent we are given a profound lesson from the Lord himself who teaches us what it means to be holy. Perhaps this kind of holiness is not quite like the fasting and prayer of St. Paul of the Cross who preached to the poor in dark and swampy places, or not the same as the gentleness and soothing touch of a St. Francis as he reached out to the poor and infirm. But in our readings today we discover that this kind of holiness is offered to us all, even though it may not be so easy to attain.
In the Book of Leviticus we read the immensely challenging words of Yahweh himself:
“Be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.”
The words are firm, almost a demand rather than an invitation. And then it becomes so very clear what we must do to achieve such holiness. We must not steal or lie; nor should we speak falsely to another. We cannot profane God’s name and we dare not defraud or steal from another person. And how could we ever curse a deaf person or even put a stumbling block to trip the blind one? We are to act with justice in all things whether it is with a powerful or a weak person, all are to be treated with justice and dignity. As if this is not enough the Lord tells us we may never slander another person and never stand by when our neighbor is in need. And to bring it all to a conclusion, we dare not ever hold hatred in our heart for a brother or sister but must love them as ourselves, even as we must love God above all else. So does God reveal this message to us, stamping the lesson with final words: I am the Lord.”
The Gospel passage from Matthew is even more powerful as we have another lesson in what holiness is all about. Holiness is when we give food or clothing, comfort and compassion, to another because, in so doing, we indeed do it to the Lord himself. As long as we do it to the least of our brothers and sisters this act of holiness is one that is bestowed upon the Lord himself. Such is holiness. This is what it means to be a saint! Let us learn well from the colorful readings on this Monday of the first week of Lent.
Fr. Pat Brennan, C.P. is the director of Saint Paul of the Cross Passionist Retreat and Conference Center, Detroit, Michigan.
First Sunday of Lent
Scripture:
Genesis 9:8-15
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1: 12 -15
Reflection:
“Lord, who throughout these forty days…” The opening line of a traditional Lenten hymn for Eucharistic celebration is sometimes jokingly understood and written as “Lord, who threw out these forty days…” This version of the hymn may be more attractive to those of us who have a limited appreciation of our need to repent. But here we are, once again, at the beginning of our forty days attempting to figure out just what it is we will offer up for the holy season and why we will be offering it up for the holy season. Perhaps we will be able to discover the deeper meaning together.
Our first clue comes from the number “40”. The ears of those of us who believe in the Christian scriptures ought to perk right up when we hear the number “40”. We know immediately that it is not necessarily a time idea but is rather a symbolic number meaning the length of time given for someone to enjoy a deeper, richer, more profound experience of God and God’s love in one’s life. We remember the 40 days of rain in Noah’s day, Elijah’s 40 days in the desert, Israel’s 40 years in the desert, the Lord’s 40 days of fasting, and the 40 days from the Resurrection to the Ascension. All occasioned a deeper experience of God’s presence and love.
We have, then, our 40 days for a deeper bonding with God. Our reading from Genesis teaches us about the foundation of that bonding with the Lord, i.e. the covenant God initiated with His people. In this sacred moment, God chose to unite Himself with humanity with a loving bond which would never be broken again. What a tremendous moment in human history ! God pledges to us never to leave us alone, never to abandon us, never to destroy us over sin again. And it is not because we deserved it. It is because of the enormity of God’s love for us. Perhaps we can say it this way, God cannot help Himself, when He looks upon us, He sees the divine reflection and keeps falling in love with us over and over again.
Our second reading from the First Letter of Peter reminds us that this marvelous covenanted bonding of love between God and us has been finalized once and for all time through the death and resurrection of Jesus. The cross of Jesus became for us the most eloquent expression of God’s determination to be one with us forever. This bond of love, then, becomes the clarion call to us to repent and believe the Good News which we hear in Mark’s gospel passage today. Too often we think repentance means turning away from some terribly large evil in which we may have a hand. For many of us, this is simply not the case. Rather, we are called to move toward a more perfect love of God by searching through our hearts and lives for those small places of darkness, those corners where we hold on to a bit of pride or selfishness, where we consider ourselves better than another person or group of persons, where we hold onto a resentment or lack of forgiveness for a past hurt or betrayal. These are the areas of our hearts and lives which still need God’s redemptive grace. These are the areas which made continuing repentance a necessity for each one of us.
We are called during these “40” days of our holy season of Lent to open ourselves up to a deeper, richer, more profound experience of God and His love in our lives. In doing so, we open ourselves to the continuing repentance we need to grow into the holiness to which the Lord Jesus calls us.
Fr. Richard Burke, CP, is a member of St. Paul of the Cross Province and also serves on the Provincial Council of Holy Cross Province. He lives at St. Ann’s Monastery in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Scripture:
Reflection:
Down in Taylor Country, Kentucky, where the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains rise, there was some farmland belonging to my grandfather, given to his people by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln, as reward for their serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. The farmhouse on this property abuts against a hill rising several hundred feet behind it, and at the foot of this hill, close to the house, can be found a spring of cold water dripping out of the hillside, into a carefully constructed basin built by my father in 1937 or thereabouts, a process that I observed. This was a more convenient arrangement for gathering water than tramping over to the well, some considerable distance away. It may still be there, though times have changed. But it was a valuable asset in those days.
And in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range running the length of the state of California can be found, next to Pasadena, the village of Sierra Madre, within which the Passionist Retreat House of Mater Dolorosa can be found, perched against these hills. Given the perennial scarcity of water in that area, a Passionist Brother named Joe discovered and excavated a water source in the rise behind the retreat house, in 1959, constructing a basin for collecting a pool of cool, fresh water, much along the lines of the one in Taylor country. I offered some minimal help in this project. It still waters the land.
These water references help to appreciate the promises made by the prophet Isaiah in today’s readings as he alerts his readers to what the Lord will do on their behalf: He will “…satisfy your thirst in parched places…” so that “…you shall be like a watered garden, like a flowing spring whose waters never fail.” This was quite a bonus for doing what they ought to have been about anyways, such as removing burdens from others that they had wrongly imposed on them, and stopping malicious speech against them, or abusing the holiness of the Sabbath, disregarding their duty to God while pursuing their own interests.
What an attractive bargain for us television addicts promised, in the frequent ads interrupting the programming, a variety of medicinal benefits from products presented there, with always a lengthy proviso that we do so at our own risk of suffering any number of fearful consequences. Thankfully, Isaiah, as God’s prophet, presented no such scare tactics to his “audience”, but simply promises of good benefits to follow.
And a similar transaction occurred between Jesus and Levi (or Matthew, as we know him), as Jesus passed by the latter’s customs post. Jesus was not in any way judgmental of this tax collector, regarded by his fellow Jews as a despicable “collaborator” with the Roman occupation force. Jesus simply invited him: “Follow me”, and Levi, “…leaving everything behind…got up and followed him”. Levi’s obvious thirst for something better than what he was doing led to his own voluntary response to what was an opportunity of a lifetime for him: he “…gave a great banquet for him (Jesus) in his house…”
So we have benefits presented us today, with no threats about serious problems attached. This is an attractive scenario for beginning Lent: no downside involved other than the effort at digging into the side of the hill where the cool water can be found to slake our thirst.
Fr. Sebastian MacDonald, C.P. is a member of the Passionist formation community at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago.
