Companions on the Journey

Lent Week 5

Monday March 15, 2021

“It is Jesus you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.
“It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
St. John Paul II Address at World Youth Day, Rome, (August 19th, 2000)

Christ at the Door Poster | Religious Posters | Spiritual Posters

Tuesday March 16, 2021

My fear is the domesticated Christ, which my generation got after the Council, and which the modern world is happy with. You know, Christ who is defanged, who is a bland spiritual teacher… a teacher of “timeless truths.” That [last part] is fine and true, but it’s domesticated. The Gospels rather present this ferocious figure, meaning “The New Lord.” He’s Jesus Kyrios, “Jesus the Lord,” which means that He has supplanted all the other Lords. His cross and resurrection is something that demands a complete conversion on our part. If He’s the King, then my entire life has to change. I wanted to recover that edgy, challenging, and deeply Biblical Jesus.
Father Robert Barron In Pursuit of the Imago Dei: An Interview With Fr. Barron by Mark Nowakowski (December 2, 2014) OnePeterFive

Jesus' Tough Love - Austin Grad

Wednesday March 17, 2021

Jesus was a little baby once. Before Christmas, He was a fetus in Mary’s womb–literally abiding in her flesh, having taken his DNA structure from her, and until his birth, taking in nourishment from her blood, his tiny heart beating beneath her Immaculate heart. Those were His real lungs sucking in air for the first time in that manger on the day He was born.
Jesus has a body right now, just like you do. If you were in heaven with Him, you could pinch Him or even tickle Him. You could touch your finger to the perspiration on His brow.

Or, if you wish, you can eat his flesh at any Catholic Mass (Jesus used the Aramaic word for “chew” in John 6). Do you see it yet? The beauty of it. The mystery of it? Because you are body and soul, and because Jesus had a body, you can take Him into your body. You can consume Jesus! This is real. This is intimate. This is your flesh and His flesh. This is union.
–Bud Macfarlane Understand the “And” CatholiCity

Waifu Mary and Senpai Jesus : justneckbeardthings

Thursday March 18, 2021

People hug really hard as though they would pull the entirety of the other person into them, fuse together, form an unbreakable union; so intense that they would practically be the same person, almost indistinguishable.

The Blessed Sacrament is, in the last consideration, the supreme act of love, but in order for us to be physically united to Him, He had to become physical, material, touchable, consumable, unitable to our bodies, our flesh.
Divinity could not be transported through our veins, pumped through our cardiovascular system, pushed along by our beating hearts, unless the God who created those hearts for Himself would first unite Himself to our flesh.
In so doing, He fashioned, willingly captured His divinity in human DNA and then, becoming our food, passed His divine DNA onto those He loves most in the world.
When you go up to receive Holy Communion the Lord and King of the Universe is giving you a hug, and He means to never let go.
– Michael Vorris THE VORTEX: A CHRISTMAS HUG – From the Son of God …12/25/18 Church Militant

Jesus hugs you | Vestitorul Lui | Flickr

Friday March 19, 2021

Christianity’s great truths come to us through a Nazarene carpenter—a tekton, a builder—whose handiwork we have no clue to. Neither do we have the faintest inkling of his response to Herod’s monumental temple complex. The whole of it, with its plaza, porticos, columns, and stairs was a glory of limestone, marble and gold. Yet Jesus directed eyes to the lilies of the field, the birds of the air, to bread, weeds and mustard seeds.
The greatest cathedral of all, the only one capable of rising to the Paraclete, is the suffering human being next to us. Until we can worship on the crosstown bus, we have yet to greet the living God.
Maureen Mullarkey, Cathedrals And The Crosstown Bus (May 8, 2014)

Was Jesus really a carpenter?

Saturday March 20, 2021

The greatest riches of the Church are not found in our gorgeous legacy of art and architecture, our brilliant philosophical and scientific heritage, or even our nearly 700,000 institutions that currently serve the dignity and eternal destiny of human beings on this planet. All of these treasures, wonderful and critical as they are, are fruit borne by human beings who freely responded to and cooperated with the grace of God in their time and place. Our greatest earthly treasures are the 1.272 billion immortals and potential fruit-bearers who currently bear the surname “Catholic.”
-Sherry A. Weddell, Fruitful Discipleship: Living the Mission of Jesus in the Church and the World (2017) Our Sunday Visitor

Jesus Sports Figurine Hockey | St. Patrick's Guild

Sunday March 21, 2021
Fifth Sunday of Lent

Jn 12:20-33

Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,
and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”
Philip went and told Andrew;
then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
Jesus answered them,
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world

will preserve it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me,
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
The Father will honor whoever serves me.

“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
‘Father, save me from this hour’?
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.”
Then a voice came from heaven,
“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”
The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder;
but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”
Jesus answered and said,
“This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.
Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself.”
He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.

Fifth Sunday of Lent | USCCB