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Living Images

27/12/2020

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Fr Kenyon
‘Mary and Joseph taught Jesus primarily by their example: in his parents he came to know the full beauty of faith, of love for God and for his Law, as well as the demands of justice, which is totally fulfilled in love (see Romans 13.10).
 
From them he learned that it is necessary first of all to do God’s will, and that the spiritual bond is worth more than the bond of kinship.
 
The Holy Family of Nazareth is truly the “prototype” of every Christian family which, united in the Sacrament of Marriage and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist, is called to carry out the wonderful vocation and mission of being the living cell not only of society but also of the Church, a sign and instrument of unity for the entire human race.
 
Let us now invoke for every family, especially families in difficulty, the protection of Mary Most Holy and of St Joseph. May they sustain such families so that they can resist the disintegrating forces of a certain contemporary culture which undermines the very foundations of the family institution.
 
May they help Christian families to be, in every part of the world, living images of God’s love’.

Pope Benedict XVI
O Lord Jesus Christ, who by thy wondrous holiness didst adorn a human home, and by thy subjection to Mary and Joseph didst consecrate the order of earthly families: grant that we, being enlightened by the example of their life with thee in thy Holy Family, and assisted by their prayers, may at last be joined with them in thine eternal fellowship; who livest and reignest with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen. - Collect for Holy Family Sunday, Divine Worship: The Missal.
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Obedient Made

15/2/2019

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Fr Lee Kenyon
'The Holy Family', 1595, by El Greco (1541-1614), Hospital de Tavera, Toledo
​1. O blessed Light of Saints above,
The highest hope of mortals here,
Jesu, upon whose earliest hours
There smile the love of home most dear!
 
2. O Mary, rich in heavenly grace,
Thy Saviour hung at thy pure breast:
Fed by thy milk, warmed by thy kiss,
The infant Jesus found his rest:
 
3. And thou, the Virgin’s chosen guard,
Sprung from the ancient fathers’ line,
Whom by a father’s sweetest name
Thy Child doth call, the Seed divine:
 
4. Ye who of Jesse’s noble line
Were born, that every race and land
Might find salvation, hear our prayers
Who suppliant at your altars stand.
5. ’Tis eventide: the sun returns;
From earthly things his light departs.
Abiding here, to you we pour
Our prayers from out our inmost hearts.
 
6. Your earthly home with heavenly grace
And flowers of every virtue shone:
So may our lives and homes on earth
Express the image of your own.
 
7. Jesu, who wast obedient made
Unto thy parents, praise to thee:
Like glory to the Father be,
And Holy Ghost eternally. Amen.

The English Catholic Hymn Book no.813
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Strictly Necessary

13/2/2019

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Fr Lee Kenyon
'La disputa con los doctores en el Templo', c.1560, by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), Museo del Prado, Madrid
In this month dedicated to the Holy Family, a rosary meditation on the Joyful Mystery of the Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple:

‘When Our Lady asked her Child: “Son, why hast thou done so to us?” His answer teaches us the hierarchy, or due order, of obedience: obedience to God, which must always come first, and is often humanly mysterious. St Francis leaving his father’s house to do God’s will, St Clare, St Thomas Aquinas, must all have got strength from this Mystery.
 
Much more puzzling is the question why Our Lord, most loving of children, should have let His mother suffer that long – what must have seemed that endless – search. Journet, in Our Lady of Sorrows, sees an echo, a correspondence between Our Lady’s “Son, why?” and Our Lord’s cry on the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” The three days’ loss is one of the Seven Sorrows that make Our Lady so close to her Son in His sacrifice.
 
Meditating on this Mystery, most people look back at the three days’ loss and finish their prayer in the Temple. But others go home with the Holy Family and stay awhile at Nazareth. Chesterton has pointed out that the Holy Family takes the ordinary human family and reverses its values. Yet in the life at Nazareth the human hierarchy was kept, even though its values were reversed.
 
The child was God, but He obeyed the man who was head of the house. He had gone to the Temple in direct obedience to His heavenly Father, but now for eighteen years he would obey God through His human mother, His human foster-father. It is one of the most amazing facts of the Christian economy that God chose a way of saving men that made two human beings strictly necessary. God needed Our Lady and St Joseph: Our Lord could not alone have made a human family’.
 
from The Splendour of the Rosary, 1948, by Maisie Ward, 1889-1975
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    Fr Lee Kenyon

    Fr Lee Kenyon

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