Contemplative Haven

I cannot dance, O Lord,
Unless You lead me,
If You wish me to leap joyfully,
Let me see You dance and sing -

Then I will leap into Love -
And from Love into Knowledge,
And from Knowledge into the Harvest,
That sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.

There I will stay with You, whirling.

[Mechthild of Magdeburg] 

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NATIONAL CONSECRATION OF CANADA
TO THE SACRED HEART

The prayer I am posting here is taken from a little yellow booklet entitled, “Prayers and Hymns in Honour of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  Crusade of Prayer for Victory and Peace”, published in 1943 by an Ottawa newspaper, Le Droit.  On the inside of the front page we see: 

Nihil obstat:
R. Limoges, ptre., censor liborum, Ottavae, die 24 Aprilis 1943.

Imprimatur:
J.H. Chartrand, Vic. Gen., Ottavae, die 26 Aprilis 1943.

The booklet itself is actually dated July 4, 1943 (which I did not verify, but am presuming was the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that year).  This is all the information I have.  I googled the title, as well as the specific prayer I’m using in this post, but to no avail. The booklet came into my possession through either my mother or father, both of whom are deceased; I have many of their old Catholic missals, prayer books, holy cards, booklets, pamphlets, etc. 

It is entirely possible that I am the only person in Canada who still has a copy of this booklet.  For all I know, I may also be the only person in Canada who has even seen this prayer since World War II.  But since the Morgentaler debacle which I outlined in my previous post, I want to ensure I will not be lying on my deathbed still being the only one who knows of its existence and its importance.

So any Canadians reading here, please take this prayer.  Pray it.  Blog it.  Distribute it.  Get it into your parishes; give it to your priests; mail it to your bishops and archbishops.  Do you see that word “crusade” in the booklet’s title?  Let’s begin one, together.

National Consecration of Canada to the Sacred Heart:

“O Divine Saviour, Who, to console the sorrows of Thy Church and to heal the ills of society, hast deigned to reveal with radiant clearness the immense goodness of Thy Sacred Heart; O glorious Leader of the army of Thine elect, Thou Who hast made of Thy Heart the symbol and channel of Thy Love, the banner and pledge of our victory; O Christ, Who lovest Canada and Who hast chosen it to be the centre from which this devotion has spread throughout the New World, deign to accept the prayers of Thy servants who desire to respond to Thy invitation and to merit for our country the fulfilment of Thy merciful promises.

We consecrate ourselves entirely to Thy divine Heart; we offer Thee the homage of our souls and bodies, all that we are and all that we possess. We know that we are already Thine, O Jesus, because we have nothing for which we are not indebted to Thy Love. But we wish henceforth to belong to Thee in a special manner, to submit ourselves unreservedly to Thy reign, to keep our eyes constantly fixed on Thy Heart that we may imitate Its virtues, make Its wishes the rule of our private and public life, and use all our influence for the triumph of Its divine interests. May the blame be not ours, O Jesus, if in the future Thou shalt not reign by Thy love in our families, our cities, and throughout the whole nation.

O Mary, sweet Mother of Jesus, O Queen of Canada, thou who alone dost perfectly and worthily know and honour the Heart of thy Son, help us to put into practise with a boundless and unshakeable constancy this consecration which we now make. Do thou offer us to Him; dedicate to Him this country which has been thine since its discovery, and make of it, under the influence of the Heart of Jesus, the right arm of the Church and the instrument of His great works of love. Amen.”

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During this period leading up to the Feastday of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, I will be making the novena I posted about last year here and here, in which different aspects of Our Lady’s beautiful Icon are meditated upon each day.  To all those who are making a novena at this time, may you be filled with trust and confidence in Mary’s love and solicitude for all her children. 

I also wanted to share with you today a beautiful video I just discovered.  It is of etched-glass windows at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish in Foremost, Alberta, Canada.  The windows were created by Mary Mehlen, and there is one representing each of the Seven Sacraments, as well as one in honour of Mary and another in tribute to all who minister.  Many thanks to the YouTube channel allsaintsparish for providing this beautiful footage for all to enjoy. 

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Peter, Paul and Mary: All My Trials

Prayer for All People
O Lord, we bring before You
the distress and dangers of
peoples and nations, the pleas of
the imprisoned and the captive,
the sorrows of the grief-stricken,
the needs of the refugees,
the impotence of the weak,
the weariness of the despondent, and the
weaknesses of the aging.
O Lord, stay close to all of them.

Prayer for the Hungry
Lord Jesus Christ, You urged
us to give You food in Your hunger
which is visible to us in the starving faces
of other human beings.
Let me realize that there are millions of persons - children of
the same God and our brothers and sisters - who are dying
of hunger although they do not deserve to do so.
Do no allow me to remain indifferent to their crying need,
or to soothe my conscience with the thought that I cannot
do anything about this evil. Help me to do something - no matter
how small - to alleviate their heart-rending want. Also let me
pray regularly that these poor starving people will be rewarded
for this terrible suffering they are enduring, and be relieved
of it as soon as possible.

[From:  Catholic Book of Prayers]

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Prayer to Our Lady of Fatima for Peace
“O Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Peace, you appeared to the children of Fatima at a time of great unrest and turmoil in the world. You asked then that the world pray for peace, so that the Reign of God may be known in every land.

Our world today continues to be mired in the vicious and fruitless cycle of hatred, violence and war. Your message of peace to the children of Fatima is needed as urgently today as it was when you first delivered it.

Grant us, Mary, that peace which is so much more than the mere absence of war. Grant us God’s peace, so that we might see every man and woman as a brother or a sister, as fellow creatures of the one God. Help us to build a world of justice, which is the only sure foundation of peace. And bring us all one day into the fullness of union with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in eternity. This we ask through Christ, your Son and our Lord, the Prince of Peace. Amen.”

Taken from:  Our Lady of Fatima, with Prayers and Devotions (from the Florentine Series of booklets on the Lives of the Saints)

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The Church should daily take up Jesus’ persuasive and demanding invitation to “pray the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:38).  Obedient to Christ’s command, the Church first of all makes a humble profession of faith:  in praying for vocations, conscious of her urgent need of them for her very life and mission, she acknowledges that they are a gift of God and, as such, must be asked for by a ceaseless and trusting prayer of petition.  This prayer, the pivot of all pastoral work for vocations, is required not only of individuals but of entire ecclesial communities.  There can be no doubt about the importance of individual initiatives of prayer, of special times set apart for such prayer, beginning with the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, and of the explicit commitment of persons and groups particularly concerned with the problem of priestly vocations.  Today the prayerful expectation of new vocations should become an ever more continual and widespread habit within the entire Christian community and in every one of its parts.  Thus it will be possible to re-live the experience of the Apostles in the Upper Room who, in union with Mary, prayerfully awaited the outpouring of the Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14), who will not fail to raise up once again in the People of God “worthy ministers for the altar, ardent but gentle proclaimers of the Gospel”.

[Shepherds After My Own Heart: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of His Holiness John Paul II on the Formation of Priests in the Circumstances of the Present Day. 1992. pgs. 102-103]

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Not long ago I posted the words and music to Leonard Cohen’s beautiful song, If It Be Your Will, which touched our hearts in many different ways.  Recently I came across something closely related that I would like to share with you here.

In the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) archives, I found a series entitled, “Leonard Cohen:  Canada’s Melancholy Bard”.  Number Six in the series, “Cohen at 50″, is an archived radio broadcast from 1984, in which he is interviewed just after publication of his, “Book of Mercy”.  The whole interview is wonderful; about one-third of the way into it, spiritual mercy is the focus of the discussion.  Cohen describes what he simply refers to as a “wipe out”, but in the way he speaks of it, and of course, with “Book of Mercy” as the outcome, my feeling is that we are listening to him speak about something more akin to the dark night of the spirit rather than a burn-out.  Just to give you a little taste of the conversation (forgive me if I did not transcribe it perfectly - I hope you will listen for yourselves if you are interested in this topic) here is a bit of what Leonard says: 

Re the writing of the book:  “…where there’s no other form of expression possible… and you can’t speak, and the only thing you can say is a prayer, then this is the kind of work that follows.”

Re the experience he went through:  “…something like being stopped, something like walls, something like not being able to function in the way that you have been accustomed to, something like that.  Just the point where all the laws of necessity and relativity no longer make sense and you want to address the absolute source of things if you can locate it, and you try to locate it.” 

When the interviewer, Peter Gzowski , comments to Leonard that the book resulting from this experience is “not necessarily the work of a believer, this is not…a demonstration of faith or conviction, is it?”, Leonard responds:

“Those kinds of questions - I believe or I don’t believe - those belong to the mind, and, appropriately to the mind…but…when you find yourself in that landscape where the only thing you can do is prayer, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or not, because you’re not using that faculty that evaluates the reality of faith or the reality of God or not - it’s a completely different landscape; it is a cry, and there is an object of the cry, and it’s a certainty in that place.”

“One is not interested in proving or not proving the existence of the object; if you address yourself to the source of mercy, you might have the good luck to discover that there is a source of mercy… There is a source of mercy as I experienced it, and these poems are the document of that address and that kind of deliverance.”

Leonard Cohen’s, “Book of Mercy” is a collection of fifty psalms.  I do not have the book myself, but here are two of the psalms that I found online: 

Number 1:
I stopped to listen, but he did not come.
I began again with a sense of loss.
As this sense deepened I heard him again.
I stopped stopping and I stopped starting,
and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance.
This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all.
Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode.
I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love.
I beg for mercy. Slowly he yields.
Haltingly he moves toward his throne.
Reluctantly the angels grant to one another permission to sing.
In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked,
the court is established on beams of golden symmetry,
and once again I am a singer in the lower choirs,
born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.

Number 50:
I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name.
The raw heart beat against the world,
and the tears were for my lost victory.
But you are here. You have always been here.
The world is all forgetting,
and the heart is a rage of directions,
but your name unifies the heart,
and the world is lifted into its place.
Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning.

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But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.  And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. (Matthew 6:6)

“This is, therefore, the real meaning of every real penitential commitment:  to withdraw from the current of exterior things, to silence the advancing hubbub of so many human voices, in order to return into oneself, into one’s deepest inner life; because it is in the silence of conscience that God waits for us.

When, in fact, Jesus says:  Go into your room and shut the door, he does not call to an isolation that is an end in itself.  That shutting the door corresponds to the one decisive opening of the human heart:  the opening to God.”

[Pope John Paul II:  Excerpted from a talk in Rome to students and their teachers, February 28, 1979, as reprinted in the Madonna House Newsletter of February 2008.] 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Direct to YouTube for this video is here.

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[Excerpt from: Light and Images. Elements of Contemplation, pgs. 75-76. Adrienne von Speyr]

“This is the law of contemplation, not merely the contemplation of the Cross, but of all contemplation of the Lord:  that the one who prays become empty of himself in order to adapt himself to what the Lord is.  In order with him and in him to say what he says, to attune his voice so closely to the Lord’s that the Father can hear them as one voice…

To desire to exist, not in the I, but in the Thou; without restriction, without a measuring of distance, without a feeling of one’s own unworthiness, and thus in the faith of a child who has been called and, through the call, has been drawn forward.

It is no game; it is no make-believe; rather, it is an integration that God himself has demanded:  we have to contemplate the Lord with the Lord’s own eyes.  With the fullness of him who is the embodiment of the Gospel, we must contemplate every mystery of salvation history, surrender ourselves to it, recognize it as the highest reality, a reality that is so strong that this history has the power to bring all things under the influence of this newly dawning reality.  Whoever looks upon the world’s misery through the Cross, whoever draws closer to the suffering of the children of men through the Lord’s suffering, is ready to arrange his contemplation in the proper way to experience the power of prayer, to receive the mysteries of the Lord’s Incarnation and crucifixion; he is ready, moreover, to receive even the mysteries of the triune God as they have been revealed, and to be changed by them.”

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Hush, lay down your troubled mind
The day has vanished and left us behind
And the wind, whispering soft lullabies
Will soothe, so close your weary eyes

Let your arms enfold us
Through the dark of night
With your angels hold us
Till we see the light

Sleep, angels will watch over you
And soon beautiful dreams will come true
Can you feel spirits embracing your soul
So dream while secrets of darkness unfold

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