Saturday, September 12, 2015

Day Two, SORROWFUL MYSTERIES, 16th Sunday after Pentecost


The Sorrowful Mysteries
Meditating on the Passion ~ St. Alphonsus de Liguori

It was the sweet study of the crucifix which made St Francis become a great seraph. He wept so continually in meditating on the sufferings of Jesus Christ, that he had almost entirely lost his sight. On one occasion, being found crying out loud and weeping, his companions asked him what was wrong. “What ails me?” replied the saint, “I weep over the sorrows and insults inflicted on my Lord, and my sorrow is increased when I think on those ungrateful men who do not love Him, but live without any thought of Him.” Every time that he heard the bleating of a lamb, he felt himself touched with compassion at the thought of the death of Jesus, the Immaculate Lamb drained of every drop of blood upon the Cross for the sins of the world. And therefore this loving saint could find no subject on which he exhorted his brethren with greater eagerness than the constant remembrance of the Passion of Jesus.

This then is the Book: Jesus crucified – which if we constantly read it will teach us, on the one hand to have a lively fear of sin, and on the other hand will inflame us with love for a God, Who is so full of love for us.  We read in His Wounds the great malice of sin which reduced a God to suffer such a bitter death in order to satisfy the Divine justice, and the love which our Saviour has shown us in choosing to suffer so much in order to prove to us how much He loved us.

Let us beseech the Divine Mother Mary to obtain for us from her Son the grace that we also may enter into these furnaces of love, in which so many loving hearts are consumed in order that our earthly affections being there burnt away, we also may burn with those blessed flames which render souls holy on earth and blessed in heaven. Amen.

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