Tuesday 26 July 2011

Joachim and Ann

MASS Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time




Saint of the Day: 26th July

Joachim and Ann

Parents of the Virgin Mary.  Little is known about the parents of Our Lady.  Their story is told in the  apocryphal Gospel of James but neither are mentioned in Holy Scripture. 
The early cult of Joachim was recorded in the East with images on the columns of St Marks in Venice.  Later, Giotto painted  Joachim and Ann in the Arena Chapel in Padua.
They were also depicted together in stained glass at Great Malvern Priory, Hereford, Worcester and elsewhere  (according to the Oxford Dictionary of Saints).  Joachim is said to be buried in Jerusalem. 


Meditation of the Day by Eugene Boylan OCSO

    [Thanks to Editor, MAGNIFICAT July 2011]
What Makes the Righteous Shine
What then have we to do? We must realise that God is our tremendous lover, that he is our all and that he has done all our works for us. We must believe in God and not in ourselves; we must hope in God and not in ourselves; we must love God and not ourselves. As Saint Augustine told us, there is one man who reaches to the extremities of the universe and unto the end of time. We have to enter into this one man - this one Christ - by faith, hope, and charity. We have to find our all in him. He is our full complement and our perfect supplement. No matter how weak we are, he is our strength; no matter how empty we are, he is our full­ness; no matter how sinful we are, he is our holiness. All we have to do is to accept God's plan - to say as Christ said coming into the world: "A body thou hast fitted to me; behold I come to do thy will, 0 God." We have to accept the self, and the surroundings, and the story, that God's providence arranges for us. In humility we must accept our self - just as we are; in charity, we must accept and love our neighbour just as he is; in abandonment, we must accept God's will just as things happen to us, and just as he would have us act. Faithful compliance with his will and humble acceptance of his arrangements will bring us to full union with Christ For the rest, let us gladly glory in our infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in us. In our weakness and in our love we shall thus become one with him, and there shall be one Christ loving himself.
DOM M. EUGENE BOYLAN, o. ClST. R.
Dom Boylan (+ 1963) was a monk of the Cistercian Abbey of Mount Saint Joseph, Roscrea, Ireland. 

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