Catholic Family Vignettes

Well...I've had an afternoon of "feasting"...visiting a few "friends", dropping a line here and there (especially here!) I'm taking the rest of the week off, and will post again next Sunday, God willing and the flu doesn't catch me!

This year's Lenten devotions include a daily reading of Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich's The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. What heart-rending images these writings invoke. I'd like to share a passage that has particularly touched me, though I'd certainly recommend reading the entire chapter for the purpose of context. Only in eternity will I ever grasp fully the level of suffering our dear Lord so willingly undertook to redeem humanity, and more specifically, me.

You can find the entire work here. And the chapter that this paragraph is taken from here.

Have a blessed week!

When God had created the first Adam, he cast a deep sleep upon him, opened his side, and took one of his ribs, of which he made Eve, his wife and the mother of all the living. Then he brought her to Adam, who exclaimed: 'This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. . . . Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh.' That was the marriage of which it is written: 'This is a great Sacrament, I speak in Christ and in the Church.' Jesus Christ, the second Adam, was pleased also to let sleep come upon him--the sleep of death on the cross, and he was also pleased to let his side be opened, in order that the second Eve, his virgin Spouse, the Church, the mother of all the living, might be formed from it, It was his will

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to give her the blood of redemption, the water of purification, and his spirit--the three which render testimony on earth--and to bestow upon her also the holy Sacraments, in order that she might be pure, holy, and undefiled; he was to be her head, and we were to be her members, under submission to the head, the bone of his bones, and the flesh of his flesh. In taking human nature, that he might suffer death for us, he had also left his Eternal Father, to cleave to his Spouse, the Church, and he became one flesh with her, by feeding her with the Adorable Sacrament of the Altar, in which he unites himself unceasingly with us. He has been pleased to remain on earth with his Church, until we shall all be united together by him within her fold, and he has said: 'The gates of hell shall never prevail against her.' To satisfy his unspeakable love for sinners, our Lord had become man and a brother of these same sinners, that so he might take upon himself the punishment due to all their crimes. He had contemplated with deep sorrow the greatness of this debt and the unspeakable sufferings by which it was to be acquitted. Yet he had most joyfully given himself up to the will of his Heavenly Father as a victim of expiation.