March 2024: Thought for the Day
Thought for the Day
March 2024
Third Sunday of Lent
3 March 2024
The Lord Jesus comes into your life expecting to find a place ordered to the worship of the one true God, but what he finds is ‘a marketplace.’ What does this mean? It means that Christ finds a place where things other than God have become primary. To bring such idolatry closer to our cultural experience, how much of your life is given over to materialism, commercialism or the accumulation of things? What rivals to the one true God have you allowed to invade the sacred space of your soul?
Bishop Robert Barron, Lenten Reflection
www.wordonfire.org
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Fourth Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday)
10 March 2024 • Mother’s Day
God himself needed a Mother: how much more so do we! Jesus himself gave her to us, from the cross: ‘Behold your mother!’ (Jn 19:27). He said this to the beloved disciple and to every disciple. Our Lady is not an optional accessory: she has to be welcomed into our life. She is the Queen of peace, who triumphs over evil and leads us along paths of goodness, who restores unity to her children, who teaches us compassion.
Mary, take us by the hand. Lead us by the hand to rediscover the bonds that unite us. Gather us beneath your mantle, in the tenderness of true love, where the human family is reborn.
Pope Francis
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Fifth Sunday of Lent/St Patrick, Bishop, Principal Patron
17 March 2024 • Day of Prayer for Emigrants
Some of us become overwhelmed by life’s contradictions. The pain and injustice that they see on every side causes them to lose all faith in God and in life. That could have happened to Jesus. If ever there was a person who had the right to doubt God, and to despair of the human race, and to become cynical about life, that person was Jesus. But through all of His injustice and all of the pain, His faith did not fail. He kept on believing in God, unlike many of us, He kept on believing in people, He kept believing in life. At Calvary, faith won.
atonementfriars.org
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Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion
24 March 2024
Our Master lies asleep and is at rest:
His Heart has ceased to bleed, His Eye to weep:
The sun ashamed has dropt down in the west:
Our Master lies asleep.
Now we are they who weep, and trembling keep
Vigil, with wrung heart in a sighing breast,
While slow time creeps, and slow the shadows creep.
Renew Thy youth, as eagle from the nest;
O Master, who hast sown, arise to reap: –
No cock-crow yet, no flush on eastern crest:
Our Master lies asleep.
Christina Rossetti Mary Magdalene
and The Other Mary; A Song For All Maries
Easter Day of the Lord’s Resurrection
31 March 2024
Women’s testimony was regarded as so worthless that they weren’t even allowed to serve as legal witnesses in a Jewish court of law. In light of this, it’s absolutely remarkable that the chief witnesses to the empty tomb are these women who were friends of Jesus. Any later legendary account would have certainly portrayed male disciples as discovering the tomb – Peter or John, for example. The fact that women are the first witnesses to the empty tomb is most plausibly explained by the reality that – like it or not – they were the discovers of the empty tomb. This shows that the Gospel writers faithfully recorded what happened, even if it was embarrassing.
William Lane Craig
(The Case For Easter, pp. 49-50)