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| Sunday 26th November, 2006 - Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King
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Daniel 7:13-14. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty—Ps 92(93):1-2, 5. Apocalypse 1:5-8. John 18:33-37. Link to Readings
The Lord, your God shall you serve, and him only.
These are stark, almost old-fashioned words. Democracy and freedom are the catch-cries of today. Bending the knee and worship are out of place in the modern world.
Lord, you call for my whole attention, the love of my whole heart, my whole soul and all my strength. But what about the many people and the situations that make demands on my time and energy? I cannot leave them.
Even though I often feel distracted in my prayer and scattered all over the place when I should be concentrating on you, I cannot cut off all the ties I have. Only by serving them and giving my life for them, can I serve you fully.
I find this hard to understand. How can worry about finance, about children, about completing work, fit in with serving you? And yet, this is what you call me to do.
Help me, Lord, to serve you, here and now, in the life I live here, in the obligations and joys of the present.
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| St Margaret Mary Alacoque
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In earlier days, a popular practice among Catholics was known as the Nine First Fridays. On the first Friday of nine consecutive months, people went to Mass and received Holy Communion. If you missed a Friday, you had to begin the cycle again - the element of challenge appealed to the imagination, especially of schoolchildren. This practice was promoted by a 17th century French nun, Margaret Mary Alacoque, who over eighteen months had visions of Jesus. She said the Lord told her to initiate devotion to His Sacred Heart in order to focus attention on His presence in the Blessed Sacrament and to stress His humanity, which had been wounded by sin. Here was an attractive middle way between contemporary irreligion and the current style of Catholicism known as Jansenism. Disbelieved at first, Margaret Mary eventually succeeded in making devotion to the Sacred Heart a core element of Catholic popular religion in the next centuries.
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