NIHIL OBSTAT:
Rt. Rev. Msgr. Malachy P. Foley
IMPRIMATUR:
Samuel Cardinal Stritch
March 1, 1954 Archbishop of Chicago +
Copyright 1954 SOUL ASSURANCE PRAYER PLAN
Lent, Love, Life Everlasting
NATURALLY SPEAKING We don't like Lent. Naturally! Because our nature wishes to enjoy itself. And Lent puts a curb on some of these natural enjoyments, which our lower nature promptly resents. Abstinence, fast, prayer, and penance do not appeal to nature.
WE LET UP AFTER LENT But does that mean that we are to be miserable and unhappy during Lent? And does it mean that after Lent we are to let up on all our Lenten practices and then go all-out for all the natural joys of the world? Is Lent just .a season of unhappiness which we use to pay for the happiness of the rest of the year?
LET -UP OF HAPPINESS No, this would be a complete misunderstanding of true happiness and of Lent. We are not to be unhappy in Lent. We are, on the contrary, to be happy in Lent and there should be no let-up of this happiness after Lent.
GIVE UP TO GAIN It all depends on the meaning of happiness. A prayerless, pagan life of pleasure is not a happy life, even though nature may like it and may enjoy it in a superficial way. No, we give up some of this natural, superficial enjoyment in food and fun, in order to gain a radically new. deep, and abiding supernatural happiness. We give up to gain. In Lent we strike a good bar- gain. We give up something of small worth to gain something of great value. What do we gain? God. Love of God and Life Everlasting. Lent can be a time of true spiritual happiness if it initiates us into love and life everlasting for which we were created. To gain this there should never be a let-up. And if we do not let up. we will not be let down either now or in eternity.
HAPPINESS We were made for happiness, for eternal joy. That is why ,all of us are always in some way seeking happiness, even though it may only be the relative happiness of avoiding pain. But when we seek happiness directly for ourselves, it evades our greedy grasp. The reason is that we were not made to find happiness just for ourselves, because we are not made for our- selves, but for God. We were made to find happiness not in pleasing ourselves but in pleasing God. Once we have learned to find our happiness in pleasing God, we will find that nothing can deeply disturb our inner joy, not even pain.
DIG FOR THE TREASURE So, if we desire to be deeply, peacefully, and perpetually happy, we have to dig below the surface of self to find welling up from the depths, the spring of joy in which we find God.
LOVE What we are really looking for is love. We want to love and be loved. We have, first of all, to believe that Christ really loves us. We I have to make acts of faith in this love until it becomes real and abiding; as, "Sacred Heart of Jesus, I believe in Thy love for me."
JESUS LOVES ME When we have caught the idea that we are loved, that the same love that Christ showed at the Last Supper ,and that He poured out on Calvary with His Blood is poured out upon us today, then love will begin to lead us in all we do. Then Lent will no longer depress us. Lent is understood only by those that love. Love, indeed, makes Lent lov,able. Then we will not end the season of Lent with a sigh of relief, but its generous spirit of giving will be continued; for if we love, we shall find happiness only in doing little hard things to please Him. Love makes the labor of Lent and of Life, light and sweet. "My yoke is sweet and my burden light:" As St. John said, we also can say: "I .am the disciple whom Jesus loves." Jesus loves me - nothing else matters.
JESUS LOVES ME NOW It is important to realize that Jesus loves me today, that His love for me is not past, but present. The love He had when, at the Last Supper, He said, "With desire I have desired to eat this Pasch with you." That love continues today. The desire for our companionship when He said in the Garden, "Could you not watch one hour with me?"-is His present desire. The great thirst for souls and for a return of love which drew from Him the cry from the cross, "I thirst."-is a present thirst of His Heart.
I WAS PRESENT TO HIM THEN Christ as God has all of us present in His Divine Mind and holds us all in His love. With God there is no past and no future, but ,all is present to Him. At the Last Supper, in Gethsemani and on the Cross, we were present to Him. He knew us then by name as individual personalities and loved us with a personal love. And so He knows and loves us now.
HIS PASSION IS PRESENT TO HIM 1f And just as we were present to Him then in the Garden and on the Cross, so His agony and suffering are present to His Divine Mind now. True, He is not now sweating blood nor is He now in torture on the cross, but yet in a way that is mysterious to us, these same things are present to Him in the timelessness of His eternal knowledge. Here indeed is a profound mystery. We cannot understand it because all our knowledge is limited by time. We pass through a succession of events. All things come and go in the order of time. But the all-seeing knowledge of God comprehends all men and all events in the eternal present. There are no distances of past and future with God. All is immediate, present. We cannot understand how this is. We only know that it is. But all we need is to abase our minds before His timeless knowledge and love, and cling to the belief that He loves us now and thirsts for our love and invites us to watch an hour with Him.
CHRIST STILL LIVES ON IN US There is, however, another sense in which His agony and passion reaches down to the present. Christ's Glorified Body has ascended into heaven and is no longer assailable by grief and torture. Yet in His Mystical Body He continues to live on in His suffering members. In this sense, as the great Pascal said, "Christ is in His agony until the end of time." We, His members, are the extension of Christ in time and in space. His agony is now extended to every member of the Mystical Body in every sick room and hospital ward. In watching ,at the bedside of His suffering members, we are bringing comfort to the suffering Christ. In these, His suffering members, He still needs the help of a Simon of Cyrene to lift the heavy bur- den from their shoulders, and a Veronica to wipe the :face of those that are bruised and bleeding. "For as long as you did it to one of these the least of My brethren, you did it to Me." And if we fail to do this, and on the contrary persecute and wound others, we can hear His words to St. Paul: "Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" Here again is a profound mystery, the mystery of Christ making Himself one with us because He is the Head and we are His members. Again we cannot know how this is so, but on His Word we can believe that it is so.
THE CHURCH PRESENTS AND MAKES PRESENT HIS LIFE Now the Church is Christ living on in this world in His members. And the Church as Christ's Mystical Body, guided by His Holy Spirit, keeps ,alive the events of the life of Christ, the Head of the Mystical Body. To make these incidents of Christ's life live again for us, the Church unrolls them before us in the cycle of the liturgical year. During Lent the Church mourns with Christ in His agony and suffers with Him in His Passion. And at Eastertide she shares the joys of His resurrection, and in mind and heart as- cends with Him into heaven. The Church not only keeps before us the past events of Christ's historical life, but even makes present the future of everlasting life by urging us, in the words of St. Paul, "to sit with Him in the heavenly places."
WE LIVE HIS PASSION IN LENT Perhaps at no other season do we enter so deeply into the earthly life of Christ as we do in Lent. Then we grieve with Him and compassicmate Him in His sufferings. In this holy season we are drawn to pray ,and to do penance in the spirit of com- passion and reparation.
WE RISE AND REJOICE WITH HIM AT EASTER But with Lent over, we are inclined to rejoice with Him in His resurrection for but a brief moment, and then cast ourselves into the joys of this world. At this season of Easter we too readily forsake the spiritual joys of the temporal joys-at least those that are innocent, and then gradually those that are not so innocent. Soon we are leading r,ather worldly lives, full of de- fects and sins.
SIN DESTROYS TRUE JOY With sin we have ruined what we gained in Lent, and lost the real joys of Easter. Instead of being a comfort to Christ we are again the cause of His agony. Just because we are excused from the regular Lenten practices of penance and prayer, we tend to live lives of no pr,ayer or penance. And when the spirit of prayer and penance vanishes, sin emerges.
NEW CREATURES OF GRACE Now Easter joy is what it is precisely because we are expected to be dead to sin and risen with Christ above the things of this world. We are to be new men, new creatures of grace. We are to rejoice that we are the redeemed sons of men. We are to scorn the things of this world and lay hold of the joys of Life Everlasting.
LOVE IS THE LINK The bridge between Lent and Life Everlasting is Love. In Lent love mourns for Him and grieves over the sins that caused His suffering. At Eastertime love rejoices with Him in the victory over sin, in the great achievement of our salvation.
LOVE NEEDS A PLAN But to keep the spirit of love alive at Eastertime and to keep our hearts filled up to the things that are above, we need some practice to take the place of our Lenten pr,actices. We need ,a plan to carry love through the year, through life and into Life Everlasting.
LOVE HAS A PLAN Now there is such a plan which is being put into practice by thousands throughout the world. It is THE SOUL ASSURANCE PRAYER PLAN. It is Love's Plan pratically assuring us of Life Everlasting.
THE SOUL ASSURANCE PRAYER PLAN
The Plan has three points:
1. Personally consecrate oneself to the Sacred Heart ot Jesus, and recite the Consecration Prayer, daily-for One Fold and One Shepherd.
2. Participate in the Holy Mass and receive Holy Communion daily, if possible -for Reparation.
3. Offer a Holy Hour once a week-for Reparation; and encourage others to do the same.
CONSECRA T ION To consecrate something means to set it aside for a holy purpose. When a chalice is consecrated, it is set aside completely from worldly use and dedicated wholly for the purpose of holding the Precious Blood at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. When a person consecrates himself to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, it means he sets himself aside from a worldly pagan life and gives himself in complete dedication to Christ. It means that he sets his heart apart, that he sets his heart free from the enslaving hold of the world and gives his heart in love to Christ Who has first loved him. It is a secret pact of love between the soul and Christ. Like a consecrated chalice, his heart is to be made holy to hold the love of Christ.
WHOLE AND HOLY To be holy simply means to be wholly Christ's, given completely to Him without reserve. And to be whole means the end of being divided between the world and Christ. It means the end of the cleavage of the heart torn between the world of self-love and the love of Christ.
HOLY AND HAPPY It is only the whole undivided heart that can be truly happy. The hardest life is the half-and-half life. If we love Christ only half-heartedly, the other half is bound to be unhappy. Our hearts were made for Him ,and they can be at rest only when they rest in Him: St. Augustine knew this from long and sad experience. "Too late have I known Thee, too late have I loved Thee, Beauty ever ancient, Beauty ever new."
ACT OF PERSONAL CONSECRATION The act of consecration can be made very simply in words of our own or even in no words. It is essentially an act of the will, giving oneself body and soul to Christ. It is simply the will taking a direction toward Christ and then regarding oneself as a thing given completely to God. It is love giving itself to the Beloved: it is love, loving Love. And if it is really love, there can be no limit in time or extent to our love. "The measure of love is to love without measure." (St. Augus- tine).
KING FOR A DAY Christ is not to be King of our heart for a day. To give oneself to Him and then the next moment to give oneself to sinful pleas- ure is to pass from consecration to desecration. However, should that happen there is only one thing to do: be sorry for our infidelity and then rededicate ourselves to Him. Indeed, the faults and failures of even the just man are so frequent that all of us stand in constant need of His merciful Love and forgiveness. To be surprised. and discouraged at our failures is to prove how proud we are of our strength. But if failure makes us contrite and humble of heart, then it is God Who is drawing good out of evil. With St. Paul we should glory in our infirmities that the power of Christ may dwell in us. Of ourselves unaided by grace, failure alone is to be expected, for "Without Me you can do nothing." But we need to remember also that "I c,an do all things in Him Who strengthens me." Our misery calls to His mercy, and the greater our misery, the more it attracts His Compassionate Love. The weaker we are, the more can His Mercy and Power be glorified in us.
THE ESSENCE OF THIS ACT This personal act of consecration can be made in our own words, or in the prayer of the Morning Offering, or according to the words of St. Margaret Mary, or in a simple wordless giving of self. But in any ~ case, it is the act of the will dedicating' ,and consecrating the heart to Christ's Heart of Love, that is essential.
THE ACT OF CONSECRATING THE HUMAN RACE Besides the act of perso.nal consecration, there I~ IS the act of consecrating the whole human - race to the Sacred Heart. Here our heart expands with the desire that every living creature be dedicated to the glory of God and to the honor and exaltation of the Sacred Heart. By this act we try to make reparation for the ingratitude and outrages of those who do not know Him or who have forgotten Him. The act of consecration of the human race given us by Pope Leo XIII is an inspired utterance. It is a privilege to say it every day.
CONSECRATION OF THE HUMAN RACE TO THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS Most Sweet Jesus, Redeemer of the human race, look down upon us humbly prostrate before Thee. We are Thine, and Thine we wish to be; but, to be more surely united with Thee, behold each one of us freely " consecrates himself today to Thy Most Sacred Heart. Many indeed have never known Thee; many too, despising Thy precepts, have rejected Thee. Have mercy on them all, most merciful Jesus, and draw them to Thy Sacred Heart. Be Thou King, 0 Lord, not only of the faithful who have never forsaken Thee, but also of the prodigal children who have abandoned Thee; grant that they may quickly return to their Father's house lest they die of wretchedness and hunger. Be Thou King of those who are deceived by erroneous opinions, or whom discord keeps i aloof, and call them back to the harbor of truth and unity of faith, so that soon there may be but one flock and one Shepherd. Grant, 0 Lord, to Thy Church assurance of freedom and immunity from harm; give peace and order to all nations, and make the earth resound from pole to pole with one I cry: Praise to the Divine Heart that wrought our salvation; to It be glory and I honor forever. Amen.
THE HOLY SACRIFICE OF THE MASS The act of consecration and reparation creates in us the ideal frame of mind for participating in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. In the Mass the priest offers this clean obLation through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ to the glory of the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit for the whole human race.
THE NEED OF A MEDIATOR Our personal consecration by itself is not enough, nor is the consecration of the whole 12 L human race sufficient. How can h\lJnan creatures be acceptable to the all-Holy God? Why should the Infinite God of Almighty Power and Divine Majesty look with favor upon even the holiest act of His finite creatures? And if these poor creatures have dared to sin and so . offend the Infinite Holiness and Justice of God, how shall they dare to address God and try to win peace and reconcilia- tion? How shall the abyss of our nothingness and sinfulness ever reach the In- finite grandeur of God and be united to . Him in peace .and love? Of ourselves we cannot accomplish this. We need a Mediator, a Bridge to God. But Christ is our Mediator and our Bridge. He is our Pontiff (which means bridge-builder). Christ as God-Man is the Bridge that spans the abyss between man and God.
THE MYSTICAL BODY OF CHRIST Christ in becoming man assumed our human nature, and by Baptism He makes each of us a member of His Mystical Body. His abiding Spirit dwells in each of us by sanctifying grace, and is the guiding Spirit of the whole Body, the Church. Christ is the Head of the Body and we are the members. He is the Vine; we are the branches.
OFFERING WITH CHRIST Now we have a means of reaching the in- finite and of finding reconciliation and union with God and peace for our souls. By His grace, as Members of the Mystical Body, we are now one in Christ. And God the Father looking upon Christ sees us in Christ and looking upon us sees Christ in us. At the Mass the Father sees Christ, the whole Christ, Head and Members, offering again this Divine Victim as it was once offered at the Supreme mo- ment of His death on the cross. His death caused by the separation of His Blood flowing from His Body, is represented on the altar by the separate consecration of the bread into His Body and of the wine into His Blood. The people have the blessed privilege of participating in the Holy Sacrifice effected by the consecrating priest, and thUs seeing represented or represented on our altars the true sacrifice, the death of Christ on the Cross. Our Mass is the real but unbloody sacrifice of Calvary. The priest, as the official representative of us the people, offers us with, through, and in Christ to God ,as an act of supreme worship and reparation. The laity, as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, partake of the priesthood of Christ and are called by St. Peter ".a royal priesthood." This privilege given the faithful at Baptism is a great dignity, but subordinate, of course, to the dignity of the ordained priest, their official representative. Here in the Mass, then, is the greatest act that can be on this earth. Who, knowing this, would willingly absent himself from Mass, even on a week day?
UNION IN HOLY COMMUNION By this Holy Sacrifice our daily little sacrifices of prayers, works, and sufferings are dignified and elevated and united to Christ's supreme sacrifice on the Cross. The Father now looks with favor on this sacrifice, and as a pledge of union and peace gives us His Precious Son in the holiest of Unions, Holy Communion. We partake of and become one with the Body and Blood, the soul and the divinity of Christ. For us He does that. And yet we have the power of choosing not to be present and not to participate! We can choose to refuse! Dare we?
THE HOLY HOUR OF REPARATION But there are many who turn aside because I they think they are too busy with such "important" things! Many simply ignore the great gifts of God, and others use His very gifts to offend Him. The great ingratitude and the unspeakable ignominy and outrage of the human race is reject- ing God and His Love, is something that wounds the hearts of men and women , who have even the least love for Christ. l Hence they ar~ eager to make some I slight reparation for this vast neglect. The Holy Hour of Reparation fills the need they feel. And it is an answer to His explicit invitation: "Could you not watch one hour with me?" Have we the hardness of heart to refuse Him one hour a week? And if we have such hardness, then let us humble ourselves and ask that our heart be wounded by love to the point where we will want to make a Holy Hour no matter how dry or desolate we may feel. Indeed, a dry and desolate hour may be the holiest of holy hours! Such an hour may well be one that will bring healing to many souls, and may save from Hell many that would otherwise be lost.
LAY ALTAR APOSTLES It is a joy and privilege to be an Altar Apostle! An Apostle is one who is sent; that is the basic meaning of the word. An Altar Apostle is one who is sent to fulfill a mission expressed by laymen kneeling at the foot of the Eucharistic Throne in a Catholic Church, making reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for their own sins and for the sins of mankind. At the Altar of the Sacrifice these Lay Apostles console the Heart of Christ, by offering before the Blessed Sacrament exposed the fervent prayers of their hearts in union with the pr,ayers centered on the Passion of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani; they lead the prayers with the congregation. These Apostles are responding to Our Divine Lord with a wholehearted, "Yes, we will watch one hour with You."
VOLUNTEERS ONLY! The very presence of these Altar Apostles before the Sacramental Christ exposed on the Altar for Adoration and Thanksgiving, for Expiation and Petition, speaks of their voluntary apostleship in fulfilling ,an expressed wish of the Sacred Heart of Jesus' to all of us. At Paray Ie Monial, Jesus made a loving request, through the agency of St. Margaret Mary, to everyone of us to share with Him in the conquest of souls, to help souls sub- mit to the rule of Divine Love. THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY RESISTANCE TO GOD NEEDS ATTENTION! + +
For Further Information Concerning The Prayer Plan:
SOUL ASSURANCE PRAYER PLAN