Lent: Day 5

+JMJ

Praised be Jesus Christ!

Put to the Test
Call on Christ for help when facing temptation of any kind and He will deliver you.
Luke 4:1-13

And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil.

After one amazing weekend, I feel as though full of the Holy Spirit myself. Now the hard part: keeping myself focused on the Lord. This weekend was the Here I am Lord Conference in St. Charles, IL. Friday evening was a healing Mass celebrated by Fr. Stan Fortuna. It was truly a refreshing and powerful Mass. I felt a great love in my heart for Our Lord present in the Most Blessed Sacrament. It was wonderful to feel this consolation and immense love within my heart. Thank you dearest Jesus for this small grace. I needed to feel this as this holy season begins.

Saturday was filled with many wonderful talks by a great variety of persons, each with something similar yet totally different and profound! It was a very rich and wonderful experience. I only hope I will be able to digest it all and retain that which is needed. At lunch I ate with some wonderful Polish and Slovakian Religious along with a missionary Priest who gave an awe inspiring talk about what he does. He told a story that will forever change the way I view missionaries. May God bless them in their ministry and give us many many missionaries! It was a wonderful time just to sit and listen to them. They were a hoot!

It was beautiful to see the many religious present at the event and even the beauty and purity I saw in the Sisters and religious that I 'hung' around with. The Daughters of St. Francis of Assisi were giving me some of their winnings from the drawing earlier that evening so that I would 'survive' driving home in the winter storm that night. Fr. Andy and one of the Sisters from the aforementioned community came to help scrape the ice off of my windows on my car! May God reward them for their kindness! The one Sister is returning to Slovakia on Friday (although I cannot recall her name! I am hoping to find out somehow!) and I wanted to thank her for her beautiful witness that evening.

There was one thing on Saturday that was very bothersome to me, and I really need to work on. During the time for Q&A with the religious (ladies were with the women religious and men with the male religious), I had this one young lady who I am assuming may still be in her junior year of high school. When I was last at the conference, she was in the same group as me and just drove me batty! Her shirt, was rather loose fitting in the front and she was sitting on the rear part of the pew and leaning over, when right in front of her was a young man (note: this is from the last time I was there and the Q&A groups were co-ed). I was on the right of this young man, and apparently she hadn't the least idea that you could see straight down her shirt while she was leaning over! That poor young man. I was very tempted to tell her she ought to sit up as I too could see what the young man did. I didn't purely because I did not want to embarrass her and also because she would not stop talking! It suddenly seemed as though Q&A time was for her to talk about herself.

This year, the modesty issue was cleaned up and nowhere in sight. But she did take the opportunity to talk about herself and about how she was going to be an exchange student and she was hoping to be in Italy. I do have to say, the dear Sisters did not get much in the conversation! I did grab the chance to ask a question as soon as I could because I could not bear anymore to hear about her and what she was doing. I asked basically how the Sisters knew that they were called. I got one answer from one sister before one of the other sisters (in lay clothes, she was also married and became a religious after her husband passed away and her kids grew up) began to tell me about something, and because I felt that it was more or less not applicable to me, I tuned it out. Shame on me. I must have had such a rude look upon my face and now looking back, I feel awful about it. Although, I did ask the question more or less for the other young women in the group, and not so much for myself. God, forgive me of my fault.

There was also Mass on Saturday evening celebrated by Bishop Paprocki of Chicago. It was a beautiful but very crowded Mass as it was the parish's regular Saturday evening Mass. The Psalm when sung by the cantor, she had replaced every single male pronoun referring to God with either 'God' or something else that fit. It was not the only place where I heard this either. At Mass the previous night, one young lady behind me did the same thing with the prayer right after the offertory. GAH! I cannot explain the sheer aggravation I had! It was so upsetting to hear!

What is so wrong with calling God 'he'? It truly only makes sense that we call Him that in the first place! And should it really even matter? Why cannot we just pray the prayers prescribed by the Church just as they are? Why do we even feel a need to change something so minuscule as that? I do understand that God has no gender in reality, but in our human need to apply gender to things in language, it is proper to give God a male one. For one, Jesus is male. Jesus is indeed True God and True Man. I think that one is obvious. Now, the Holy Spirit, although spoken about sometimes in the female, it would be difficult to describe the Holy Spirit as female and being the Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Also, God is called Father all over the scriptures. Are the scriptures all wrong too? Must we go 'fix' them as well? I see really no good reason to be changing prayers and songs all willy-nilly like.

Forgive me my rants. I do wish for union, but if the little things keep the multitudes apart, how can we say that we are one? The Church is beyond all these little things. I need very much to look beyond these and look to Our Lord. He is truly the reason for anything we do in the Church. May the Blessed Virgin Mary guide us all to come to know and lover her Son more and more. May St. Joseph protect the One, Holy, and Apostolic Catholic Church. Amen.