Alone with Jesus in the desert, we begin to experience just how beloved we are of God. The Father manifests to us the divine heart of love, of tenderness, of compassion and mercy. The Son reveals to us the profundity and depth of this love, complete, total, unconditional, self-giving and self-sacrificing. The Holy Spirit moves intimately and dynamically to make all things new, to renew, refresh and enliven us, to pray within us and for us in ways we cannot understand.
As the consciousness of this perfect love deepens within us, our being becomes suffused with healing and transforming light and life and energy. This is the good news that we can share in the power of the Spirit with all creation as servants and friends and the beloved of this most holy Trinity.
The Grace We Seek: To experience how much we are lovedby God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Reflection Material
A. From theRule of Life
3. By our lives as Missionary Servants (as Cenacle Lay Missionaries) we seek first to glorify the Triune God. We follow in the footsteps of the apostles who, filled with the Holy Spirit, went forth from the Cenacle to spread everywhere the knowledge and love of Jesus. We live and work that God’s name may be hallowed, that his kingdom come, that his holy will be done (Matt. 6:9-10).
B. From the Word of God
The baptism of Jesusreveals to usThe Triune God – Mark 3:13-17
The Father calls us by name. We are His – Isa. 43:1-4
The Son is the image of the Father and way to the Father – John 14:1-7
Jesus promises to send the Spirit, the gift of the Father – John 14:12-21
C. From Father Thomas Augustine Judge, C.M.
1. Letter Conference to Missionary Servants (December 31, 1928)
Letter to Joachim V. Benson, S. T. (January 6, 1932)
Today at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass we must offer our thanksgiving to the Triune God for His goodness and mercy toward us, especially during the past year. His graces and blessings, spiritual and temporal, have been without number. We do not begin to thank Him sufficiently. What inadequate appreciation and response we make to Him!
There has been that constant flowing of grace through the Cenacle and the joy and peace that come in the prosecution of corporal and spiritual works of mercy. We owe so much thanksgiving for those deeper and hidden personal graces, given to our souls. (Let us hope that on this first day of a new year) the angels of God see us higher up on the holy mountain.
Let us refresh our souls with the thought that perhaps our celestial brethren note in us an increase of sanctity.
How thankful we should be that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit gives us the grace to be servants, Missionary Servants; that we are permitted familiarity and intimacy with the sacred mysteries, so much so as almost to be a familiar in the home of the Holy Family. I leave it to yourselves, my dear children, to detail in your own minds motives for Thanksgiving. You yourselves can add and multiply reasons indefinitely for joy and gladness and thanksgiving in the Lord.
Gratitude implies appreciation. It insists upon realizations of how and whence the favors have come, and recognition that some external response should be made to show the interior sentiments that we have of thankfulness. We do appreciate these favors; that is why we are trying to be thankful. We realize whence they came and how much they stand for God’s love toward us. Now the important thing is, what is to be the response.
What are we going to do this coming year . . . to show a good and thankful heart to Him whence every good gift comes? The answer must be individual and personal. It may work around our practice, it may bring us out of bed more promptly in the morning. It may make us more zealous in our morning prayer and meditation; it may make us more alert and Eucharistic in the chapel and at the altar . . . It may increase fraternal charity in our relations with one another. It may show us more zealous and urge us to strive for a better knowledge of the value of the human soul and make us forget ourselves that we may think more of God and do more for His honor and glory. In other words, its expression may be a greater piety and zeal or fraternal charity or self-sacrifice. [MF:1352-54]
A blessed and happy New Year to you, a year that will find you founded more and more in the faith and trust in God whose loving providence takes note of the burnt blade of grass in the field and the passing of the animal in the bush and the fluttering of the smallest resident of the birdland. [MF:10820]
2. Letter to Sr. Isolina Ferré, M.S.B.T. (July 14, 1933)
God is the Great Designer. Look around, read, be informed of the designs that He works out in the sky, in the sea, in the earth. What a tempo! What a scheme there is to His universe! It would be a thrilling exercise of delight for the friends of this Infinite Being of Beauty, goodness and Power to discuss which of His designs appeals most to them or which is the most beautiful. The opinions, no doubt, would vary with the disputants but surely all would unite in this, that nowhere is this Almighty Designer more wonderful than in the providence and life plan of each of his creatures whom He has created to His own image and likeness.
Apply this to yourself, my dear child, The Almighty Designer has a life plan for you and every day his mysterious Providence is weaving this into a work of incomparable beauty for His own honor and glory, your eternal ecstasy, and for the good of your neighbor. You can see this in others. Others see it in you. You see it in the servants of God and they see you being woven into an exquisitely heavenly design.
Here apprehension rushes in. Will anybody or anything interfere or spoil the design? There is danger of interference of a great ruin and this danger comes mostly from ourselves. We become impatient with God’s ways. Our capricious desires and restless nervousness murmur at the restraint that is necessary for the Divine worker or perversely, even insanely at times, we wish another design, a design of our own. What a pity if our perversity prevails. You see, then the value of being patient. What a beautiful doctrine our divine Lord gave us, what a secret happiness when He taught us: “Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matt. 6:34)
The theme of the wonderful design in your life is already beginning to be seen. It is entrancingly beautiful. It makes one gasp. I wonder if you perceive it yourself. Understand there is a beautiful providence being worked in your life. You can begin to trace the hand of the Divine Artist. [MF:10774]
Missionary Cenacle Spirituality 