Mother of Discernment, we come before You today.\u00a0 Allow us to be in\u00a0\u00a0 Your loving presence with a humble and contrite heart.\u00a0 We come to renew our mind and our heart.\u00a0 We beg You to bring us the presence of the Holy Spirit, asking for the Gift of Discernment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thank You, Mother, for Your loving presence that fills us with peace and joy.\u00a0 We are Your children whom, as in Pentecost, are here before You.\u00a0 We believe that You have chosen us to be Tabernacles of Discernment, but we need Your strength to discover the Will of the Father in our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We come to beg You to take away everything that prevents us from doing the Will of the Father.\u00a0 You taught us that the most important thing is to do His Will.\u00a0 Many times, we live in darkness and we cannot see clearly.\u00a0 That is why we ask You, today, to heal all our wounds.\u00a0 All those wounds that make us turn away from You and Your Beloved Son.\u00a0 We feel ashamed before Your presence, but we know that You love us and that You are always ready to help us.\u00a0 Therefore, we ask You, in a very special way, to give us discernment in our lives and to restore our Will.\u00a0 That Will that through sin is often weakened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Enlighten our senses, but above all, we ask You to give us the Gift of Discernment through the Holy Spirit who dwells in You. Illumine the path of our journey.\u00a0 Fill us with peace and joy to serve You.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Come, Holy Spirit, come!<\/strong> Creed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n On the small beads 7 times:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary, Tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, increase the Gift of Discernment in my life.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n 3 Hail Mary\u2019s and 1 Glory Be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ejaculation: <\/strong>Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of Our Lady of Discernment. Take me to the depths of my being, take me to the desert, come to heal this restless heart of mine \u2014 worried, hurt, sad and hardened.<\/a> Give me discernment and calmness to listen to the Will of God. Give me Your breath of encouragement, give me Your water that cleanses and renews. Mother of Discernment, my poor heart entrusts everything to You. Today, I surrender and bring down all the walls that surround me. I submit myself to discernment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reflections:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Solemnity of Pentecost –<\/strong> BENEDICT XVI<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n REGINA C\u00c6LI<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n St Peter’s Square Sunday, 23 May 2010<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThus, there is no Church without Pentecost. And I would like to add that there is no Pentecost without the Virgin Mary. This is how it was at the beginning, in the Upper Room, where the disciples “with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and with his brethren”, as the Acts of the Apostles<\/em> says (1: 14). And this is how it always is, in every place and in every time. I witnessed it a short time ago at Fatima<\/a>. What did that great multitude on the square in front of the Shrine experience, where we were truly all of one heart and one soul? It was a renewed Pentecost. In our midst was Mary, the Mother of Jesus. This is the typical experience at the great Marian sanctuaries Lourdes, Guadalupe, Pompeii, Loreto or even in the smaller ones. Wherever Christians gather in prayer with Mary, the Lord grants his Spirit.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n POPE FRANCIS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n MORNING MEDITATION IN THE CHAPEL OF THE Three Wonders<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Monday, 23 January 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, the Pope recalled the Lord\u2019s words as recounted by Mark, \u201cTruly, I say unto you, all will be forgiven the sons of men\u201d \u2014 and we know that the Lord forgives everything if we open our hearts a little, everything! \u2014 \u201cthe sins and whatever blasphemies they utter\u201d \u2014 even the blasphemies will be forgiven! \u201cBut whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin.\u201d And so, this person, when the Lord returns, will hear this phrase: \u201cFollow me!\u201d This is because, the Pope explained, \u201cthe great priestly anointing of Jesus was done by the Holy Spirit in Mary\u2019s womb. In the ordination ceremony, priests are anointed with oil; and we always talk about priestly anointing.\u201d And \u201cJesus, as high priest, received this anointing\u201d in the first anointing in \u201cthe flesh of Mary through the work of the Holy Spirit.\u201d So, one who \u201cblasphemes about this, blasphemes the foundation of God\u2019s love, which is redemption, the re-creation; blasphemes the priesthood of Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Lord forgives everything,\u201d explains Pope Francis, \u201cbut whoever says these things has no forgiveness, doesn\u2019t want to be forgiven, doesn\u2019t allow himself to be forgiven.\u201d And \u201cthis is the terrible thing about blaspheming the Holy Spirit: not allowing oneself to be forgiven, because it denies the priestly anointing of Jesus through the Holy Spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the small beads 7 times:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary, Tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, increase the Gift of Discernment in my life.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n 3 Hail Mary\u2019s and 1 Glory Be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ejaculation: <\/strong>Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of Our Lady of Discernment. Take me to the depths of my being, take me to the desert, come to heal this restless heart of mine \u2014 worried, hurt, sad and hardened. Give me discernment and calmness to listen to the Will of God. Give me Your breath of encouragement, give me Your water that cleanses and renews. Mother of Discernment, my poor heart entrusts everything to You. Today, I surrender and bring down all the walls that surround me. I submit myself to discernment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reflections:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n True Devotion to Mary by St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor this reason, the more he finds Mary His dear and inseparable spouse in a soul, the more powerful and effective he becomes in producing Jesus Christ in that soul and that soul in Jesus Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n St. John Paul II – GENERAL AUDIENCE<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wednesday, 28 May 1997<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary prays for outpouring of the Spirit<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the Church and for the Church, mindful of Jesus\u2019 promise, she waits for Pentecost and implores a multiplicity of gifts for everyone, in accordance with each one’s personality and mission.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n POPE FRANCIS HOMILY June 8, 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Learning from Mary to keep the Word of God<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Vatican Radio <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Mary, we must learn to receive and keep the Word of God safe in our hearts. Marking the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary at morning Mass Saturday, Pope Francis pointed out that Mary assimilated the Word of God into her life, by meditating it and pondering what message the Lord had for her through His Word. This, he said is what safekeeping means. Pope Francis developed his homily around the two themes of astonishment and safekeeping, starting from the Gospel of the day Luke chapter 2. It recounts the astonishment of the teachers in the Temple listening to Jesus and Mary\u2019s keeping the Word of God safe in her heart. Astonishment, the Pope observed, “is more than joy: it is a moment in which the Word of God comes, is sown in our hearts.” But, he warned, “we cannot always live in wonder,” this should be \u201ckept in our hearts\u201d throughout our lives. And this is precisely what Mary does, when she is “astonished” and keeps the “Word of God” in her heart: On the small beads 7 times:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary, Tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, increase the Gift of Discernment in my life.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n 3 Hail Mary\u2019s and 1 Glory Be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ejaculation: <\/strong>Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of Our Lady of Discernment. Take me to the depths of my being, take me to the desert, come to heal this restless heart of mine \u2014 worried, hurt, sad and hardened. Give me discernment and calmness to listen to the Will of God. Give me Your breath of encouragement, give me Your water that cleanses and renews. Mother of Discernment, my poor heart entrusts everything to You. Today, I surrender and bring down all the walls that surround me. I submit myself to discernment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reflections:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n JOHN PAUL II – <\/strong>GENERAL AUDIENCE<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wednesday, 28 May 1997<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary prays for outpouring of the Spirit<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the nascent Church she passes on to the disciples her memories of the Incarnation, the infancy, the hidden life and the mission of her Divine Son as a priceless treasure, thus helping to make him known and to strengthen the faith of believers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Vatican Basilica \u201cMary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart! (Lk <\/em>2:19). In these words, Luke describes the attitude with which Mary took in all that they had experienced in those days. Far from trying to understand or master the situation, Mary is the woman who can treasure, that is to say, protect and guard<\/em> in her heart, the passage of God in the life of his people. Deep within, she had learned to listen to the heartbeat of her Son, and that in turn taught her, throughout her life, to discover God\u2019s heartbeat in history. She learned how to be a mother, and in that learning process she gave Jesus the beautiful experience of knowing what it is to be a Son. In Mary, the eternal Word not only became flesh, but also learned to recognize the maternal tenderness of God. With Mary, the God-Child learned to listen to the yearnings, the troubles, the joys and the hopes of the people of the promise. With Mary, he discovered himself a Son of God\u2019s faithful people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Gospels, Mary appears as a woman of few words, with no great speeches or deeds, but with an attentive gaze capable of guarding the life and mission of her Son, and for this reason, of everything that he loves. She was able to watch over the beginnings of the first Christian community, and in this way, she learned to be the mother of a multitude. She drew near to the most diverse situations in order to sow hope. She accompanied the crosses borne in the silence of her children\u2019s hearts. How many devotions, shrines and chapels in the most far-off places, how many pictures in our homes, remind us of this great truth. Mary gave us a mother\u2019s warmth, the warmth that shelters us amid troubles, the maternal warmth that keeps anything or anyone from extinguishing in the heart of the Church the revolution of tenderness inaugurated by her Son. Where there is a mother, there is tenderness. By her motherhood, Mary shows us that humility and tenderness are not virtues of the weak but of the strong. She teaches us that we do not have to mistreat others in order to feel important (cf. Evangelic Gaudian<\/em><\/a>, 288). God\u2019s holy people have always acknowledged and hailed her as the Holy Mother of God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To celebrate Mary as Mother of God and our mother at the beginning of the new year means recalling a certainty that will accompany our days: we are a people with a Mother; we are not orphans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mothers are the strongest antidote to our individualistic and egotistic tendencies, to our lack of openness and our indifference. A society without mothers would not only be a cold society, but a society that has lost its heart, lost the \u201cfeel of home.\u201d A society without mothers would be a merciless society, one that has room only for calculation and speculation. Because mothers, even at the worst times, are capable of testifying to tenderness, unconditional self-sacrifice and the strength of hope. I have learned much from those mothers whose children are in prison, or lying in hospital beds, or in bondage to drugs, yet, come cold or heat, rain or draught, never stop fighting for what is best for them. Or those mothers who in refugee camps, or even in the midst of war, unfailingly embrace and support their children\u2019s sufferings. Mothers who literally give their lives so that none of their children will perish. Where there is a mother, there is unity, there is belonging, belonging as children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To begin the year by recalling God\u2019s goodness in the maternal face of Mary, in the maternal face of the Church, in the faces of our own mothers, protects us from the corrosive disease of being \u201cspiritual orphans\u201d. It is the sense of being orphaned that the soul experiences when it feels motherless and lacking the tenderness of God, when the sense of belonging to a family, a people, a land, to our God, grows dim. This sense of being orphaned lodges in a narcissistic heart capable of looking only to itself and its own interests. It grows when we forget that life is a gift we have received \u2013 and owe to others \u2013 a gift we are called to share in this common home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was such a self-centered orphanhood that led Cain to ask: \u201cAm I my brother’s keeper?\u201d (Gen <\/em>4:9). It was as if to say: he doesn\u2019t belong to me; I do not recognize him. This attitude of spiritual orphanhood is a cancer that silently eats away at and debases the soul. We become all the more debased, inasmuch as nobody belongs to us and we belong to no one. I debase the earth because it does not belong to me; I debase others because they do not belong to me; I debase God because I do not belong to him, and in the end, we debase our very selves, since we forget who we are and the Divine \u201cfamily name\u201d we bear. The loss of the ties that bind us, so typical of our fragmented and divided culture, increases this sense of orphanhood and, as a result, of great emptiness and loneliness. The lack of physical (and not virtual) contact is cauterizing our hearts (cf. Laudato Si\u2019<\/em><\/a>, 49) and making us lose the capacity for tenderness and wonder, for pity and compassion. Spiritual orphanhood makes us forget what it means to be children, grandchildren, parents, grandparents, friends and believers. It makes us forget the importance of playing, of singing, of a smile, of rest, of gratitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Celebrating the feast of the Holy Mother of God makes us smile once more as we realize that we are a people, that we belong, that only within a community, within a family, can we as persons find the \u201cclimate,\u201d the \u201cwarmth\u201d that enables us to grow in humanity, and not merely as objects meant to \u201cconsume and be consumed.\u201d To celebrate the feast of the Holy Mother of God reminds us that we are not interchangeable items of merchandise or information processors. We are children, we are family, we are God\u2019s People.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And from your celestial home
Shed a ray of light divine!
Come, Father of the poor!
Come, source of all our store!
Come, within our bosoms shine.
You, of comforters the best;
You, the soul’s most welcome guest;
Sweet refreshment here below;
In our labor, rest most sweet;
Grateful coolness in the heat;
Solace in the midst of woe.
O most blessed Light divine,
Shine within these hearts of yours,
And our inmost being fill!
Where you are not, we have naught,
Nothing good in deed or thought,
Nothing free from taint of ill.
Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
On our dryness pour your dew;
Wash the stains of guilt away:
Bend the stubborn heart and will;
Melt the frozen, warm the chill;
Guide the steps that go astray.
On the faithful, who adore
And confess you, evermore
In your sevenfold gift descend;
Give them virtue’s sure reward;
Give them your salvation, Lord;
Give them joys that never end. Amen.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nFirst Mystery:\u00a0 Mary Most Holy, Tabernacle of the Holy Spirit.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
DOMUS SANCTAE MARTHAE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nSecond Mystery:\u00a0 Heart of Mary, permanent cenacle of God<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
“Keeping the Word of God: what does this mean? Do I receive the Word, and then take a bottle and put the word into the bottle and keep it there? No. Keeping the Word of God means that our heart opens, it is open to that Word just like the earth opens to receive the seed. The Word of God is a seed and is sown. And Jesus told us what happens with the seeds: some fall along the path, and the birds come and eat them; this Word is not kept, these hearts do not know how to receive it.\u201d<\/strong>
Others, he said, fall into a stony soil and the seed dies. Jesus says that they “do not know how to keep the Word of God because they are not constant: When a tribulation comes they forget.” The Pope said that the Word of God can often fall into a soil that is unprepared, unkept, full of thorns. And he asked, what are the thorns? Jesus pointed them out when He spoke of “attachment to riches, vices.\u201d Pope Francis said \u201ckeeping the Word of God means constantly meditating on what this Word says to us and what happens in our life.” And this \u201cis what Mary did,\u201d she \u201cpondered and assimilated it.” This, said Pope Francis, “is a truly great spiritual work.\u201d
\u201cJohn Paul II said that, because of this work, Mary had a particular heaviness in her heart, she had a fatigued heart. But this is not the same as tired, it is fatigue<\/em>, this comes from effort<\/em>. This is the effort of keeping the Word of God: the work of trying to find out what this means at this moment, what the Lord wants to say to me at this time, this situation of questioning the meaning of the Word of God is how we understand. This is reading our life with the Word of God and this is what it means to keep it in our hearts<\/em>“.<\/strong>
Pope Francis added that memory also safeguards God’s Word. \u201cIt helps us to preserve it, to remember everything the Lord has done in my life.” He continued: \u201cit reminds us of all the wonders of salvation in His people and in my heart. Memory safeguards the Word of God.” The Pope concluded his homily urging everyone to think “about how to keep the Word of God in our hearts, how to safeguard this astonishment, so that it is not eaten by birds, suffocated by vices:”
“We would do well to ask ourselves: ‘With the things that happen in life, I ask myself the question: what is the Lord saying to me with His Word, right now?\u2019 This is called keeping the Word of God<\/em>, because the Word of God is precisely the message that the Lord gives us in every moment. Let us safeguard it with this: safeguard it with our memory. And safeguard it with our hope. We ask the Lord for the grace to receive <\/em>the Word of God and keep it, and also the grace to have a heart that is fatigued in this effort. So be it.”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThird Mystery:\u00a0 Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in Her heart<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sunday, 1st January 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n