Come Away By Yourselves
"Come away by yourselves to a secluded place and rest a while." These words of Jesus Christ are an invitation to personal and intimate prayer. The meditations offered in this podcast are intended to help the listener enter into his own prayerful relationship with God. By reflecting on scenes from the Gospel, on other passages from Scripture, and on the insights of saints and spiritual writers, we can strengthen our faith in Jesus and our love for God. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, "I have called you my friends." By regular meditation and dialogue with Our Lord in prayer, our life can be transformed into an ever deepening and loving friendship with God.
Episodes
Mary Magdalene's encounter with the Risen Christ is truly a master class in love. She teaches us lessons of desire, sorrow, responsibility and union with God. Ultimately, to love is to convert, to make the center of our existence God and others shifting it away from ourselves.
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The Holy Mass makes present Jesus' Resurrection as well as his sacrifice on the Cross. The Body of Christ, as a resurrected body, is a gift that is given to others. To receive our Lord is to become like him and moves us to imitate his goodness.
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Putting ourselves into the scenes of the Resurrection, we can have our own personal encounters with the Risen Lord. Where can we find him? What is he saying to us? How does he want to help us?
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Jesus's death is a great mystery of our faith. It leads to his resurrection and to our eternal life. In accepting death, Jesus enters into the nothingness of sin and evil to conquer it from within. Through his death, he is reborn into resurrected, eternal life. In our Christian life, he invites us into the same dynamic journey.
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Jesus's sacrifice on the cross is already accepted and offered by him at the Last Supper. "This is my body, given for you." Both the Mass and the Cross reveal to us an incredible love. A love that we are called to imitate and a love that can make us secure no matter what happens to us in this life.
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As we enter Holy Week, we contemplate the suffering of Jesus in his passion. This suffering reveals to us both the gravity of sin and the unfathomable love of God for us in Jesus Christ. To contemplate our Lord in his passion can and should be a spur to personal conversion.
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A short reflection in honor of St. Patrick.
God entrusts St. Joseph with his most precious possessions, his mother and his Divine Son. We too are entrusted with a sacred responsibility in life: to care for and love God's children. Everything and everyone in our life--including ourselves--is a gift from God, something valued by God himself. This calls for a great reverence and respect on our part. We can't "do whatever we want" with ourselves or others...
"By your patience you will win your souls." Endurance, perseverance, patience: life is hard at times and seems long, to be faithful to Christ and others we need to stick it out over the long haul.
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The great commandment is to love God "with all of your mind, with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength." Adoration is how we love God most directly as God. This humble recognition of God's holiness, transcendence, and radical goodness is essential for our lives as Christians. Like most things, however, we have to learn to adore God by practicing it. We need to enter into the pre...
In Lent we turn our gaze towards the sufferings of Jesus. Jesus suffers voluntarily, freely, out of love for us. Our Lenten penances are an opportunity to do the same for him. Self-denial is an essential aspect of moral strength and freedom. Without it we are incapacitated to love God and others as we should.
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Lent is a wonderful opportunity to find our peace, joy, and comfort in God. We do this by denying ourselves our usual sources of support, distraction, and pleasure. To be filled by God is to run the risk of emptying ourselves out of other things. This takes trust, courage and patience. God always responds to this kind of personal faith, even when it is imperfect and needs to grow.
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In this week's Gospel, Jesus cures a leper who tells him, "If you will, you can make me clean." In confession, Jesus always wills to cleanse us of sin. These last days before Lent are a great time to pray about the conversion from sin that God is asking of us.
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Today's reading from the Gospel of Mark continues directly from last Sunday's gospel reading. Read together, they give us a picture of a day in the life of Jesus. Jesus's day is filled with work, prayer, and service. He approaches his tasks and situations with generosity and self-forgetfulness. This day in his life is a good model for any day in our own lives.
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The parable of the prodigal son is a parable of freedom and filiation. The prodigal son and his older brother both misuse their freedom. They mistakenly feel constrained by their relationship with their father and end up rejecting him. The prodigal son rediscovers his sonship by reflecting on the truth of his situation. This speaks to a close connection between true freedom and the truth itself. The elder son acts correctly f...
The first in a series of classes on the Nicene Creed. We cover the concepts of Creation and Conservation, the omnipotence of God and out capacity to know God with reason alone.
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God wakes up the young boy Samuel four times when he gives him his vocation as a prophet. God will also wake us up from different forms of spiritual slumber when we go to him in our times of prayer. Jesus does something similar with Andrew and John. When they take their very first steps as disciples, he asks them "What are you seeking?" We should reflect on how much we listen to God in our prayer, how engaged our ow...
The feast of the Epiphany tells us that Christ meant for everyone. The Magi are the very first of billions of gentiles who will come to be saved in Jesus. The journey of the Magi speaks to us of our own need to search for God. The star they follow and the finding of Jesus bring them great joy, as our own vocation and conversions give us the joy of meeting God in Christ.
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Christmas puts before us the Virgin Mary loving and caring for her Divine Son. It's a scene that we can enter into in our prayer and in our life. Jesus says that we too are "his mother" insofar as we do God's will. God allows Mary and all of us to love him in the Christ child just as He has always loved us: with a mother's heart. Christmas is a time to begin life again with a newfound trust in the goodn...
Originally published Christmas 2020
How wonderful it must have been for the Shepherds from Bethlehem to enter the stable on Christmas night ! Our times of prayer this Christmas are our own chance to be close to the baby Jesus, to speak softly with Mary and Joseph, to be wrapped up in the mystery of God present in the Child. The warm light of the fire in the stable lets us see and welcome into our lives him who is the Lig...
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