Reflections for Lent is designed to enhance your spiritual journey through the forty days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday (17 February - 3 April 2021). Covering Monday to Saturday each week, it offers reflections on readings from the Common Worship Lectionary, written by some of today's leading spiritual and theological writers. Each day includes: • Full lectionary details for Morning Prayer • A reflection on one of the Bible readings • A Collect for the day This volume offers daily material for 17 February to 3 April 2021, taken from the Reflections for Daily Prayer 2020/21 annual edition. It is ideal for individuals and groups seeking Lectionary-based reflections for use during Lent and Holy Week, or for anyone wishing to try Reflections for Daily Prayer before committing to a year's worth of material. It also features a simple form of morning and night prayer and a guide to Lent.
Prayerfully journey through Lent with Mary DeTurris Poust's fresh and meaningful reflections on the daily Mass readings. In just minutes per day, the insightful meditations of Not by Bread Alone can deepen your experience of this solemn season of prayer and penance.
Do you want to love your neighbor as yourself but don’t know where to start? This practical, accessible guide to bridging the dividing lines of politics, race, and economics, both individually and as the church, will help you amplify Jesus in your community and build God’s kingdom. When asked what the greatest commandment is, Jesus gave a two-part answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” and also “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love God. Love others. Jesus’ simple command to love your neighbor can feel overwhelming when your neighbor looks, lives, and votes differently than you do. Racial and economic tensions across the country have resulted in deep dividing lines that seem really intimidating to cross. Docusen breaks down these lines in approachable chapters, including topics like these: how to actively seek out people you can benefit and encourage, what it means to find a diverse and supportive community that fulfills needs, examples of real-life experiences, including highlights and missteps of Docusen’s ongoing journey, and how churches can teach on difficult topics with grace and truth. Neighborliness is a practical guide to bridging those dividing lines and learning to recognize and amplify the beauty of God in our communities. Backed by David’s speaking and training through the Neighborliness Center, this book will help individuals and churches reach out to their neighbors, love them through Christ, and build God’s kingdom.
Even three hundred years ago, believers found it difficult to sustain for forty days the proper Lenten spirit. That's why even then, countless Christians turned to the writings of Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), whose great piety and simple eloquence won him renown as one of the greatest preachers of his time. From Bishop Bossuet's sermons and spiritual writings, believers drew ever greater Lenten wisdom and strength. Now translator Christopher Blum has selected from Bishop Bossuet's voluminous works fifty brief but remarkably powerful meditations that complement the daily readings at Mass during the Lenten season, thus offering to us the perfect companion for a thoughtful and fruitful Lent. If you read and meditate briefly on just one of them each day in Lent, I guarantee that this good French bishop's eloquence will soon have you not merely remembering the events of Christ's journey to His Crucifixion; it will have you spiritually walking with Him on that journey . . . which is precisely what we are called to do in Lent! With Bossuet, this Lent you will find yourself saying, "O Jesus! I present myself to you to make my journey in your company. O my Savior, receive your traveler! Here I am ready, holding on to nothing. Let me go with You to the Father." That's the fire that should burn in the heart of all Christians. This Lent, let Bishop Bossuet enkindle it in yours. Among the Meditations: God Alone Suffices Pray to God in Secret The Truth and the Life Tempted in the Desert The Sign of Jonah Love Your Enemies This Is My Beloved Son And You Will Be Forgiven The Wicked Tenants In Spirit and in Truth The Silence of Christ Priest, Prophet, and King Our Life, a Journey to God The Great Commandment I Was Hungry and You Fed Me The Love of God for Repentant Sinners Up to Jerusalem God, the Life of the Soul The Witness of the Baptist The Raising of Lazarus Jesus Is Persecuted The True Messiah The Anointing The Betrayal The Eucharist The Passion The Brevity of Life Washed of Our Sins A Sign of Contradiction No Man Ever Spoke Like This Man The Entry of Our Lord into Jerusalem To Unite Ourselves with Christ
Famous for setting in motion the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther is often lifted high as a hero or condemned as a rebel. But underneath it all, he was a man of flesh and blood, with a deep longing to live for God. This biography by respected Reformation scholar Herman Selderhuis captures Luther in his original context and follows him on his spiritual journey, from childhood through the Reformation to his influential later years. Combining Luther's own words with engaging narrative designed to draw the reader into Luther's world, this spiritual biography brings to life the complex and dynamic personality that forever changed the history of the church.
This Lent, we invite you to make a pilgrimage to the cross with seven extraordinary women and men of God. Come and journey with Blessed Sára Salkhaházi through Nazi-occupied Hungary, with Venerable Augustus Tolton through late-nineteenth-century Illinois, with Servant of God Dorothy Day through Depression-era New York, with St. Martín de Porres through seventeenth-century Peru, with St. Óscar Romero through twentieth-century El Salvador on the verge of civil war, with Servant of God Thea Bowman through Civil Rights-era Mississippi, and finally, with Servant of God Julia Greeley through turn-of-the-century Colorado. Each week of Lent is dedicated to one of these exemplars of faith and action, prayer and perseverance. Each day Monday through Saturday follows the same format: a reflection on the life or writings of the saint or Servant of God, a Scripture selection from the day’s mass readings, and two meditative prayer suggestions, one based on the saint or Servant of God’s life, and one based on the Scripture. Each week also highlights an aspect of Catholic Social Teaching that the saint or Servant of God exemplified in their life. On Sundays, we rest in Scripture and sacrament. It’s our prayer this lent that we may be reminded that we are all called to holiness and that there are no unlikely saints.
The Catholic Daily Reflections Series was written to help you enter more deeply into the Holy Scriptures and the Catholic Liturgy on a daily basis. Through these reflections and prayers, you are invited to embrace the Word of God in a personal, engaging, challenging and transforming way. These reflections are also a great resource for priests and deacons for their daily homily preparations. This Volume offers daily reflections and prayers for Lent and Easter. Catholic Daily Reflections Series: Volume One: Advent and Christmas Volume Two: Lent and Easter Volume Three: Ordinary Time: Weeks 1-17 Volume Four: Ordinary Time: Weeks 18-34
The annual Lenten pilgrimage to dozens of Rome’s most striking churches is a sacred tradition dating back almost two millennia, to the earliest days of Christianity. Along this historic spiritual pathway, today’s pilgrims confront the mysteries of the Christian faith through a program of biblical and early Christian readings amplified by some of the greatest art and architecture of western civilization. In Roman Pilgrimage, bestselling theologian and papal biographer George Weigel, art historian Elizabeth Lev, and photographer Stephen Weigel lead readers through this unique religious and aesthetic journey with magnificent photographs and revealing commentaries on the pilgrimage’s liturgies, art, and architecture. Through reflections on each day’s readings about faith and doubt, heroism and weakness, self-examination and conversion, sin and grace, Rome’s familiar sites take on a new resonance. And along that same historical path, typically unexplored treasures—artifacts of ancient history and hidden artistic wonders—appear in their original luster, revealing new dimensions of one of the world’s most intriguing and multi-layered cities. A compelling guide to the Eternal City, the Lenten Season, and the itinerary of conversion that is Christian life throughout the year, Roman Pilgrimage reminds readers that the imitation of Christ through faith, hope, and love is the template of all true discipleship, as the exquisite beauty of the Roman station churches invites reflection on the deepest truths of Christianity.
The 2021 Lent Book takes the Lord's Prayer as a basis for Lenten reflection. At a time of change, uncertainty and widespread anxiety, we need to discover again the freshness of our most familiar spiritual resources. Stephen Cherry's Lent Book does exactly this by inviting the reader to immerse themselves in the most central, important and iconic of Christian prayers – the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father. Mining the tradition for wisdom and insight, and finding inspiration in the theologians of the past such as St Paul, Gregory of Nyssa, John Calvin, but also more contemporary voices such as Evelyn Underhill, Simone Weil, and Michelle Obama, Thy Will Be Done presents the comforts and challenges of the prayer in 36 short chapters. This most accessible Lent Book, rich in anecdote as well as analysis, is daily bread for the spiritually hungry.
Lent is about more than going to church on weekdays and giving up chocolate or social media. It’s also a time to form one’s heart and mind through study and prayer. In Where the Eye Alights, Marilyn McEntyre offers forty short meditations, based on excerpts from Scripture and poetry, that guide readers on a devotional journey from Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday. As in lectio divina—the spiritual practice of reading Scripture repetitively and meditatively—McEntyre invites us to notice words that may give us pause and summon us to reflection. This book calls our attention to how the Spirit speaks through phrases that can open doors to deep places for those willing to sit still with them. “Lent is a time of permission,” says McEntyre. “Many of us find it hard to give ourselves permission to pause, to sit still, to reflect or meditate or pray in the midst of daily occupations—most of them very likely worthy in themselves—that fill our waking minds and propel us out of bed and on to the next thing. We need the explicit invitation the liturgical year provides to change pace, to curtail our busyness a bit, to make our times with self and God a little more spacious, a little more leisurely, and see what comes. The reflections I offer here come from a very simple practice of daily meditation on whatever has come to mind in the quiet of early morning.”
