Get More out of the Mass This Year

Michael Dubruiel wrote a book to help people deepen their experience of the Mass.  He titled it, How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist.  You can read about it here. 

How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist gives you nine concrete steps to help you join your own sacrifice to the sacrifice of Christ as you:

• Serve: Obey the command that Jesus gave to his disciples at the first Eucharist.
• Adore: Put aside anything that seems to rival God in importance.
• Confess: Believe in God’s power to make up for your weaknesses.
• Respond" Answer in gesture, word, and song in unity with the Body of Christ.
• Incline: Listen with your whole being to the Word of God.
• Fast: Bring your appetites and desires to the Eucharist.
• Invite: Open yourself to an encounter with Jesus.
• Commune: Accept the gift of Christ in the Eucharist.
• Evangelize :Take him and share the Lord with others.

Filled with true examples, solid prayer-helps, and sound advice, How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist shows you how to properly balance the Mass as a holy banquet with the Mass as a holy sacrifice. With its references to Scripture, quotations from the writings and prayers of the saints, and practical aids for overcoming distractions one can encounter at Mass, this book guides readers to embrace the Mass as if they were attending the Last Supper itself.

73 Steps to Spiritual Communion with God - 9

This is a continuation of the 73 Steps to Spiritual Communion with God. The previous are posted below among the other posts and last week's archives. Here is the ninth Step:

(9) And what one would not have done to himself, not to do to another (cf Tob 4:16; Mt 7:12; Lk 6:31).

The Golden Rule is well known across cultures. At an early age we are taught to treat others in the same way that we wish to be treated. Has this rule fallen on deaf ears though in our time?

Could it be that we no longer think about others or care about them? What is it that has desensitized us from the needs of others?

Forty years ago people marched upon the towns and villages of the south to protest the way people of color were still being treated; almost a century since the cessation of slavery. Something of the Golden Rule motivated those marches and when television cameras broadcast those images to the rest of the nation soon others changed their opinions too.

But forty years later it seems that the multiplicity of those images along with the dramatization of similar images has lessened the impact of reality. Like a collective hypnosis we seem not to be affected by the plight of our fellow human anymore. Like a callous that develops from constant friction, the flood of images of suffering and hurting individuals has dampened our ability to care.

I suppose that recognizing this, is the first step to diagnosing it as a problem that is destroying us as a society. St. Benedict’s maxim can serve as a corrective. The first step is to really feel, what it is that I feel.

How do I feel when someone smiles at me? It feels good, I feel important or at least that this person is well disposed toward me which is also a good feeling. If this is so I should offer a smile to those who life cast in my path today.

How do I feel when someone treats me in a manner that makes me feel that my existence is inconsequential to them? Probably not very good, then I need to even in a small way acknowledge everyone as an important part of God’s plan for me today.

We tend to be a society in touch with their feelings. It is a small step to return back to a more civil manner of existence where I believe that there is not just “me” but us on this planet. Everyone is important in God’s plan. My feelings are the key to defining how I should treat others in the way that God wants me to do.

The Pope in Assisi

I began to watch the live coverage of this at 4:00 a.m. this morning, but fell asleep during the Gospel, here is what I missed (and I suspect you did too)from Asia News Italy:

Francis’ conversion to Christ, “the desire to ‘transform himself’ in Him” is key to understanding the life of the saint from Assisi, which has become the model and ideal for the commitment on many modern day themes: “the search for peace, safeguarding nature, promotion of dialogue between men. Francis is a true master of all these things. But he is because based in Christ. Christ in fact is “our peace” (Eph 2, 14). Christ is the very centre of the cosmos, because through him all things were made ( Jn 1, 3)”.
By centring the Poor man from Assisi in Christ, Benedict XVI re-vindicated the figure of Francis from attempted ideological and religious manipulation, which tends to portray him as an ephemeral ecologist in love with nature, or as a “soft hearted” soul, open to everything and everyone, an “excessive interlocutor”, forgetful of his Christian identity and of the Gospel.
Since early this morning the Pontiff has been on a pilgrimage to the Franciscan sites of Assisi to celebrate the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis’ conversion.
After a short pause at the Rivotorto, where St. Francis lived with the first brothers for about two years, he passed on to the sanctuary of St Damian, where Francis received the call of the cross to go and “make his Church whole again”, and the Church of St May Magdalene, the memorial of Saint Francis’ service to the lepers.
During the homily in the square below the basilica, the Pope traced the personality and conversion of Francis referring to the figures of the converted described today in liturgy of the word, on the XI Sunday of the year.
He recalled above all the personage and sin of David, fallen “low” and “blinded by his passion for Bethsabe”. Francis, continued Benedict XVI, perhaps did not sin as David, but – according to his own accounts as laid out in his testament - “above and beyond single episodes, his conceiving and pursuit of vain dreams of earthly glory was sinful”: His “naturally generous soul” did not allow him to dominate “the physical disgust” when faced with lepers. “By serving the lepers, by kissing them – underlined the Pope – he was not merely making a philanthropic gesture, it was not just a 'social conversion’, no, it was a religious experience, commanded by the initiative of God’s grace and by love for God….man is truly realised by the measure in which he lives with God and in God, recognising and loving him in his fellow man”.
The Pontiff then went on to compares Francis and the apostle Paul, the first who speaks of “stigmata” on his body, thus clearly marking the ecclesial nature of their commitment, not as simple bearers of good values or activists. “In the discussion over how to live in an upright way, or how to live the Gospel – affirmed the Pope – in the end, the arguments of thought to no twin; the reality of life has the final word, communion lived and suffered with Christ, not just in thoughts or in words, but to the very depths of existence involving the body and the flesh. The bruises which emerge from a long story of passion and torment are the witness of Christ’s cross on the body of Saint Paul, they are his stigmata”. And turning again to Francis he adds: “his journey was the daily strain to become like Christ. He fell in love with Christ. The wounds of the cross pained his heart, before they marked his body on the Verna. He really could say together with Paul: ‘I no longer live, it is Christ who lives in me’”:
The third figure recalled by the Pope is that of the sinner whom Christ forgives because “they have greatly loved”. “In Christ – adds the Pope – God gifts us love and asks us for love”. And he adds: “My dear brothers and sisters what else was the life of Francis converted if not a great gesture of love? His passionate prayers reveal this, rich in contemplation and praise, his tender embrace of the Child in Greccio, his contemplation of the passion in a Verna, his "living according to the way of the Sacred Gospel” (2 Test 14: FF 116), his choice of poverty and his search for Christ in the face of the poor. This is his conversion to Christ, to the very point of wanting to ‘transform himself’ into Him, becoming in him a complete image, which explains his typical way of life making it relevant in all times regarding the great themes of today, such as the search for peace, safeguarding nature, the promotion of dialogue between all men. Francis is a true master of these things. But he is because based in Christ. Christ in fact is “our peace” (Eph 2, 14). Christ is the very centre of the cosmos, because through him all things were made (Jn 1, 3)… Christ is the divine truth, the eternal "Logos", in which all "dia-logos" finds its foundation. Francis profoundly incarnates this “Christological” truth which is at the very root of human existence, of the cosmos and of History”.
Dwelling on this relationship between Logos and dialogue, Benedict XVI defined the sense of the Assisi meeting launched by John Paul II in October 1986, gathering together the representatives of the great religions to pray for peace. According to some that encounter was a “selling short” of the Christian identity in the name of an impossible unity with other religions; for others, the following development of the Church, and of the Church of Benedict XVI, so careful of Christian identity, was a “betrayal” of Assisi. According to the Pope, that encounter 20 years ago was a “prophetic intuition and a moment of grace”. “The choice of celebrating this encounter in Assisi – underscored the Pontiff – was suggested by the witness of Francis as a man of peace, whom many regard with esteem and affection, even those of other religions and cultures. At the same time the light of the Poor man from Assisi over that initiative was a guarantee of its Christian authenticity, in so far as his life and his message are visibly based on the choice of Christ, rejecting outright all temptations of religious indifference, which has nothing whatsoever to do with true inter-religious dialogue. The ‘spirit of Assisi’, which since that event has continued to spread throughout the world, opposes the spirit of violence, the abuse of religion as a pretext for violence. Assisi tells us that faithfulness to ones own religious convictions, faithfulness above all to Christ crucified and risen, is not expressed by violence and intolerance, but in sincere respect of the other, in dialogue, in a message which appeals for peace and reconciliation”. Saint Francis is thus a model for all Christians of a true evangelical behaviour, capable of “uniting acceptance, dialogue and respect for all with the certainty of faith which each Christian …..is called to cultivate, announcing Christ as the way, truth and life of mankind (Jn 14, 6), the true Saviour of the world”