Luky
WHEN MY MOTHER WAS FIRST MARRIED SHE USED TO BE TERRIBLY HOMESICK FOR HER OWN PARENTS AND THEIR LARGE FAMILY, EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE LIVING QUITE NEARBY.
So whenever she had the opportunity she put her baby in the pram and went to visit her mother in the daytime.
On one occasion she found the latter feeling very despondent.
On being asked why, she gave a time-honoured reason for her grief:
"Your father", she said, "says I'm spending all his money. He reckons I haven't got a clue about finance, and try as I may, I don't see where I can cut down on my budget."
My mom rooted her pen from her bag, found a sheet of paper and sat down beside her mother to help her work out a new budget.
"And will you believe", my mother always asked with the same degree of astonishment when telling the story, "that she was subscribing to thirty-four different religious periodicals?"
Like my grandmother I'm devoted to religious periodicals, and I sigh for the days when the back of every church held a stand containing publications from the Catholic Truth Society. That's why I was so grateful when an anonymous benefactor sent me a year's free subscription to Soul magazine from the USA.
I simply love Soul, being the kind of "prop" Catholic so many clearthinking people disapprove of so heartily.
And here I'm thinking about people like the correspondent who deplored the fact that some people are convinced they're going to heaven because they made the nine First Fridays, since I'm a most enthusiastic private in their ranks - a rather Sad Sack-like character, it is true, since it took me six years to accomplish one consecutive run of Fridays. Does that make me some kind of a record holder?
Jokes aside, one Soul I read which reached me in 1975 contained a paragraph headed Triple Jubilee.
I hope you'll be as excited as I was to learn that 1975 was more than just the Holy Year, but also the 300th anniversary of the apparition of our Lord to Margaret Mary Alacoque, when He promised salvation to all those who make the nine First Firdays.
And if he really did say that, who can doubt His word?
With St Thomas Aquinas I say: "What God's Son has told me, take for truth I do, Truth itself speaks truly, or there's nothing true!"
Finally, said Soul, 1975 was the 50th anniversary of the apparition of our Lady to Sister Lucia, the Fatima visionary, who said she showed her heart pierced by thorns and spoke those pathetic words: "You at least try to console me."
According to Lucia, our Lady asked her to make known to the world that she would assist at death with all the graces necessary for salvation those who on five consecutive first Saturdays would confess, go to Holy Communion, recite part of the Rosary and spend fifteen minutes in an effort to make reparation for sin.
If you can't go to Rome on pilgrimage in a Holy Year, try to make a spiritual pilgrimage instead by starting the nine First Fridays and including the five first Saturdays at the same time.
If our Lord and our Lady have offered us these aids to salvation, it would be churlish to deny them, and if you can do the first Fridays you might as well do the first Saturdays at the same time.
A woman I know had given birth to twins and was telling us about her sense of surprise at the confinement.
"I was so relieved to find it was all over," she said, "when the doctor called out: 'Hold it! There's another one!"
"How did you feel then?" I asked. We were speaking Afrikaans at the time, so she said: "Ag man, ek het maar net gedink:* 'In for a penny, in for a pound!' "
* "Oh well, I just thought"
Adore te Devote
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xs67InkZ3A
Adore te Devote, English translation 'Godhead here in hiding'
http://www.chantcd.com/lyrics/godhead_here_hiding.htm
Soul Magazine
https://wafusa.org/category/soul-magazine/page/2/
The great promise of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
http://churchinterfaith.blogspot.ie/2015/10/the-great-promise-of-sacred-heart-of.html
Devotion of the Five First Saturdays
http://lumierecharitymarian.blogspot.ie/2016/09/devotion-of-five-first-saturdays.html
With thanks to Youtube, Chanted.com and Wafusa.org
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