Holy Face Novena: Day 1

Veronica's Veil

The Holy Face of Jesus from the image on Veronica's veil, said to be the cloth used  by Saint Veronica to wipe the face of Christ during His Passion. Our Lord specifically mentioned Veronica's act of compassion and reverence when he made ten promises to Sister Marie of Saint Peter.

Pope Pius IX

Said “This salutary reparation to the Holy Face of Jesus is a divine work, destined to save modern society.”

On April 17th, 1958, His Holiness Pope Pius XII approved the observance of a Feast of the Holy Face of Jesus on Shrove Tuesday (Tuesday before Ash Wednesday).  Contact us for the wording of the Holy Face Mass to be said upon the Feast.

“See how I suffer. Nevertheless, I am understood by so few. What gratitude on the part of those who say they love me. I have given My Heart as a sensible object of My great love for man and I give My Face as a sensible object of My Sorrow for the sins of man. I desire that it be honoured by a special feast on Tuesday in Quinquagesima (Shrove Tuesday – the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday). The feast will be preceded by a novena in which the faithful make reparation with Me uniting themselves with my sorrow.”

(Our Lord to Mother Pierina 1938).

FIRST DAY

(Console Holy Face and recite Daily Preparatory Prayer).
Psalm 51,3-4.
Have mercy on me, O God in your goodness,
in your great tenderness wipe away my faults:
wash me clean of my guilt, purify me from my sin.
O most Holy Face of Jesus, look with tenderness on us
who are sinners. You are a merciful God, full of love and
compassion. Keep us pure of heart, so that we may see Thee
always. Mary, our Mother, intercede for us; Saint Joseph.
pray for us.
Through the merits of your precious blood and your Holy
Face, O Jesus, grant us our petition(state your intentions)Pardon
and mercy.

Prayer to Our Almighty Father
Almighty Father, come into our hearts, and so fill us with
your love that forsaking all evil desires, we may embrace
you, our only good. Show us, O Lord our God, what you
are to us. Say to our souls, I am your salvation, speak so
that we may hear. Our hearts are before you; open our ears;
let us hasten after your voice. Hide not your Face from us,
we beseech you, O Lord. Open our hearts so that you may
enter in. Repair the ruined mansions, that you may dwell
therein. Hear us, O Heavenly Father, for the sake of your
only Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
(St. Augustine)
Pray one (1) Our Father, three (3) Hail Mary’s, one (1)
Glory Be.
O Bleeding Face, O Face Divine, be every adoration Thine.
(Three times)

The Golden Arrow

Sr. Marie of St. Peter and of the Holy Family OCD received the devotion to the Holy Face July 8 in the 1840s at the Tours Carmelite Monastery...for reparation...
                                
Order of Carmel Discalcecd Secular - Meditations from Carmel Podcast
Quotations from Sister Saint Pierre Carmelite of Tours

"He told me that He wished to give me a "Golden Arrow" wherewith to wound His Heart delightfully, and heal those wounds inflicted by sinner's malice."

"He has given it to me as a "Golden Arrow," assuring me that each time I would say it, I would open His Heart with a wound of love."

"At that moment it seemed to me I beheld issuing from the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by this "Arrow," torrents of graces for the conversion of sinners."

"Our Lord has promised me that He will imprint His divine likeness on the souls of those who honour his most holy Countenance."

"All those who honour My Holy Face in a spirit of reparation, will be so doing perform the office of the pious Veronica."

"According to the care you take in making reparation to My Face disfigured by blasphemies, so will I take care of yours which has been disfigured by sin. I will reprint therein My image and render it as beautiful as it was on leaving the Baptismal font."

"Our Lord has promised me, that all those who defend His cause in this work of reparation, by words, by prayers, or in writing. He will defend them before His Father; at their death He will purify their souls by effacing all the blots of sin and will restore to them their primitive beauty.
-----------

Sister Marie of Saint Pierre (from the Carmel of Tours) and the Golden Arrow 

In Tours, France during the 1840's a young Carmelite nun, Sister Marie of Saint Pierre, received a series of revelations from Our Lord about a powerful devotion He wished to be established worldwide - the devotion to his Holy Face. The express purpose of this devotion was to make reparation for the blasphemies and outrages of 'Revolutionary men' (the Communists), as well as for the blasphemies of atheists and freethinkers and others, plus, for blasphemy and the profanation of Sundays by Christians.
This devotion is also an instrument given to the individual devotee as a seemingly unfailing method of appealing to God in prayer - through adoration of His Holy Face and Name.
The following prayer was dictated by our Lord Himself to Sister Marie of Saint Pierre. Opening His Heart to her, our Saviour complained of blasphemy, saying that this frightful sin wounds His Divine Heart more grievously than all other sins, for it was like a "poisoned arrow".
After that, our Saviour dictated the following prayer, which he called "The Golden Arrow", saying that those who would recite this prayer would pierce Him delightfully, and also heal those other wounds inflicted on Him by the malice of sinners. This prayer is regarded as the very basis of the Work of Reparation.

                                 The Golden Arrow Prayer

"May the most holy, most sacred,
most adorable, most mysterious
and unutterable Name of God
be always praised, blessed,
loved, adored and glorified,
in heaven, on earth and under the earth,
by all the creatures of God,
and by the Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ
in the most holy Sacrament of the altar."
Amen

"Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Adorable Face of Thy Beloved Son for the honor and glory of Thy Holy Name, for the conversion of sinners and the salvation of dying souls."
-- Sister Saint-Pierre
"O Jesus, who in Thy bitter Passion didst become "the most abject of men, a man of sorrows", I venerate Thy Sacred Face whereon there once did shine the beauty and sweetness of the Godhead; but now it has become for me as if it were the face of a leper! Nevertheless, under those disfigured features, I recognize Thy infinite Love and I am consumed with the desire to love Thee and make Thee loved by all men. 
The tears which well up abundantly in Thy sacred eyes appear to me as so many precious pearls that I love to gather up, in order to purchase the souls of poor sinners by means of their infinite value. O Jesus, whose adorable face ravishes my heart, I implore Thee to fix deep within me Thy divine image and to set me on fire with Thy Love, that I may be found worthy to come to the contemplation of Thy glorious Face in Heaven.  Amen."   ~St. Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face
Psalm 30:20-21 
"O how great is the multitude of Thy sweetness, O Lord, which Thou hast hidden for them that fear Thee! Which Thou hast wrought for them that hope in Thee, in the sight of the sons of men. Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy Face, from the disturbance of men. Thou shalt protect them in Thy tabernacle from the contradiction of tongues."

 
 Picture taken by tantumergo(A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics)-thanks for this picture.

Carmelite Monastery of Infant Jesus of Prague and St. Joseph-Dallas TX - where the Gardener meets you with 'clear water'....

This chapel is also a Shrine to the Holy Face.  To the side of the altar is the Holy Face Icon which reflects the Confraternity of the Holy Face.  It was in this chapel before the Holy Face on March 6, 2005 that I became a confraternity member.  The chapel is so beautiful now.  In my heart I still see the bare white walls and St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross flying from the walls above the altar--simpler times.  My greatest blessings were before that Holy Face.  I still see Mother Mary Regina (I know it was her.) kneeling behind the grate as my name and my mother's were added to the roll.  It was in 2006 that I received a double blessing from Fr. Louis...little did I know of its import.

I don’t think we can imagine how much good their lives of prayer, sacrifice, suffering, and love do for all of us.  
 Tantumergo: A Blog for Dallas Catholics

I so miss the 'turn' ,Mothers.

Mother Juanita: I would not have survived the brutal North Face high cold winds of the mountain without those afternoons with you in my memories.  There have been mostly tears here in this great exile.

HEATHER KING: "A SICK CHILD" BY RANDALL JARRELL

HEATHER KING: "A SICK CHILD" BY RANDALL JARRELL: 

Excerpt:

A SICK CHILD The postman comes when I am still in bed. "Postman, what do you have for me today?" I say to him. (But really...

I have been feeling very fragile, debilitated, depleted, and weak. Weary. Sometimes, when I'm emotionally and spiritually exhausted,  I get into a sleep pattern where I'll go to bed at 8 and wake at 4 or even 3 in the morning and start my day, which is to say I'll have my coffee and pray. The hours of early morning are the only time I'm able to get the deep silence and solitude my spirit craves.

As Thérèse of Lisieux writes in The Story of a Soul:

"One day one of my teachers at the Abbey school asked me what I did on my days off when I was alone. I replied that I would go behind my bed into an empty space that was there and that was easy for me to shut off with the curtain, and there, I would think.” “But what do you think about?” she said. “I think about God, about life. . . . about ETERNITY, I just think!"

We think and then we reach the limits of thought and our hearts cry out in anguish at all our limitations, not least of all our inability to abandon ourselves completely, to let the hell go, to rest. We do toil for the bread we eat, in every sense of the word bread, and every sense of the word toil.

Still, sometimes exhaustion can be a gift. When we're too tired to work up a head of steam about our usual anxieties, resentments, and obsessions, new ideas can come in sideways. The other day, out walking, for example, I thought, I wonder if heaven if there's another color, a new color, a color beyond or outside the colors we know on earth. Wouldn't that be wild? Think of it: no human being can imagine or create a color other than the colors we already have.  

Maybe there is such a color. And maybe it's thinking of us!

 -Heather King

..And Have Not Love...You are as sounding brass...

Excerpt:
The Talmud suggests a prayer to be recited upon seeing a person who is disabled; perhaps it can be applied to people with autism as well, although they often do not appear different:  One who sees… an albino, or a giant, or a dwarf, or a person with dropsy, says 
‘Blessed is He who made his creations different from one another.’ 
One who sees a person with missing limbs, or a blind person, or one with a flattened head, or a lame person, or one who suffers from boils or a person with a whitening skin complaint says, 
‘Blessed is the true Judge.’ (Talmud Bavli Berachot 58b) 
I do not expect to be celebrated by my co-religionists or anyone else for having an autistic child, but I do wish I could make friends with some of them. ~Pentimento
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014      Catholic with ASD Children     Read on...


***
Love
1If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.3And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.… 1 Cor 13:2

Hungary and Falsification of History...

Falsification of History, Loss of Trust: Hungary's Holocaust Year

George Szirtes

Excerpt:

Auschwitz Concentration Camp: Arrival of Jews Summer 1944

Photo Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-NO827-318/CC-BY-SA

Refusing to be associated with the government and its attempts to rewrite and falsify history on the occasion of Holocaust memorial Year in Hungary, some individuals, and some Jewish organisations have decided to return grants and other distinctions....Read more...

 [I dedicate this post to Margaret of Hungary who saved me. I promised you on your death bed, dear soul,whose violin music continues...]

And so will I wonder...?
I lived, but then in living I was feeble in life and
always knew that they would bury me here in the end,
that year piles upon year, clod on clod, stone on stone,
that the body swells and in the cool, maggot-
infested darkness, the naked bone will shiver.
That above, scuttling time is rummaging through my poems
and that I will sink deeper into the ground.
All this I knew. But tell me, the work—did that live on?
—Miklós Radnóti, Smajd igy tűnődöm...?, translated by Gina Gönczi

                                 

     Hypertexts

...Also in 1937 he wrote his Cartes Postales (Postcards from France), which were precurors to his darker images of war, Razglednicas (Picture Postcards). During World War II, Radnóti published translations of Virgil, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Eluard, Apollinare and Blaise Cendras in Orpheus nyomában. From 1940 on, he was forced to serve on forced labor battalions, at times arming and disarming explosives on the Ukrainian front. In 1944 he was deported to a compulsory labor camp near Bor, Yugoslavia. As the Nazis retreated from the approaching Russian army, the Bor concentration camp was evacuated and its internees were led on a forced march through Yugoslavia and Hungary. 

During what became his death march, Radnóti recorded poetic images of what he saw and experienced. After writing his fourth and final "Postcard," Radnóti was badly beaten by a soldier annoyed by his scribblings. Soon thereafter, the weakened poet was shot to death, on November 9, 1944, along with 21 other prisoners who unable to walk. Their mass grave was exhumed after the war and Radnóti's poems were found on his body by his wife, inscribed in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book. Radnóti's posthumous collection, Tajtékos ég (Clouded Sky, or Foaming Sky) contains odes to his wife, letters, poetic fragments and his final Postcards. Unlike his murderers, Miklós Radnóti never lost his humanity, and his empathy continues to live on and shine through his work...

                      (c)Ruth Mower, We Are One

Lines from "Eclogue VII"
Without commas, one line touching the other
I write poems the way I live, in darkness,
blind, crossing the paper like a worm.
Flashlights, books — the guards took everything.
There's no mail, only fog drifts over the barracks.
—translated by Steven Polgár

~The Hypertexts

Dear Margaret, I can never repay you...This is for you on Valentine's Day...

Following his appointment in 1835 to principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra,[6] Mendelssohn named his childhood friend Ferdinand David as the orchestra's concertmaster.[7] The work's origins derive from this professional collaboration. In a letter dated 30 July 1838, Mendelssohn wrote to David: "I should like to write a violin concerto for you next winter. One in E minor runs through my head, the beginning of which gives me no peace."[8] The concerto took another six years to complete. There are many possible reasons for the delay, including self-doubt,[9] his third symphony[10] and an unhappy period in Berlin... ~Wikipedia
And...RIP...remember:

Murdered Hungarian Jewish Composers/Musicians

Pál Budai

Jenő Deutsch

Zoltán Kodály

György Justus

Sándor Kuti

Walter Lajthai-Lazarus

Sándor Vándor

László Weiner

Jewish Passengers on Belgian Train Told to Get off at Auschwitz

JewishPassengers on Belgian Train Told to Get off at Auschwitz

Excerpt:

JTA reported the bizarre incident, which is believed to have been the work of adolescents who stole the keys that operate the loudspeaker.

The incident of Jan. 31 prompted the Belgian rail company SNCB to file a complaint with police over incitement to hatred, the RTL broadcaster reported Tuesday.

.....My note:
...maybe it was 'adolescents' but they are merely mirroring the sick community members in which they are being 'educated?'...
It's the '_HINO' Complex
    Humans 'in name only'
    Aesthetes 'in name only'
    Intellectuals 'in name only'
    Philosophers 'in name only'
    Theologians 'in name only'
    Christians 'in name only'
    Protestants 'in name only'
    Jews 'in name only'
    Catholics 'in name only'
    Conservatives 'in name only'
    Liberals 'in name only'
    Doctors and healers 'in name only'...................
                      but they all truly do bear the name 'barbaric evil'
...which doesn't bother those who have sold their souls to all kinds of evil and who can't wait to inflict it on everyone around them...since they can't stand even themselves...

You cannot hate your neighbor and love God.

Abbey-Roads: Courage International Director, Fr. Paul Check on ...

Abbey-Roads: Courage International Director, Fr. Paul Check on ...: Fr. Paul Check - Credit: Andreas Dueren/CNA. No change in doctrine. The discussion on what the Pope meant when he asked, " who ...

An Ordinary saint on an ordinary day in an ordinary world...

Scribes of the 'ordinary'...
Excerpt:

one night when I was awakened by a hungry baby, I sat in my rocking chair nursing and I cried. I prayed, “How do I find you like I used to, God? I need more than this.” Then I suddenly heard God whisper deep into the depths of my broken heart, “Thank you for feeding me.”

It was like a spiritual explosion in my heart, a revolution, a whole upturning of my distorted worldview. God was there, appearing in the dark of night, in my house, in my nursing child, in my domestic vocation, in the present moment. And my longing for intimacy with Jesus suddenly seemed wrapped in dirty diapers and dishes and rare dates out with my husband. After that night, I saw that church life and my me-prayer — still very important to me! — were to be servants of my life outside of church. That my home was my first church. Now I always say, and my charismatic friends laugh, that saying prayers before meals or bedtime with my children has become my new mysticism, and shopping for groceries at Walmart, my new mission trip.

The final example includes some deep questions and struggles...