Servant of God Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, C.S.P.
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HECKER REFLECTION: ON PRAYER PT. II

3/9/2015

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ON PRAYER  (Part 2)
 
These next few weeks we will be publishing Servant of God Isaac Hecker’s notes on prayer.  They were written in 1850s and used in his early morning class on prayer that he often conducted during the Parish Missions.  Hecker would hold class often at 6 in the morning to prepare people to receive baptism, reconciliation or first communion.  The class as often a jumble of different people from potential converts to  cradle Catholics who had never received the sacraments of initiation.
 
Servant of God Isaac Hecker taught:
 
In regard to prayer, someone says, we cannot always be in church or on our knees.  We cannot go every day to confession or make a meditation in the morning.  We have family to take care of.  We have business to look after.  We have work to perform.
No one knows this better than I do.  What can you do?  What must I not fail to do?  If you work at living a good life and want to save your soul, you need to pray.  You must always pray.
The mechanic at his work bench.
The labourer with his shovel.
The farmer with his plough.
The mother with her domestic chores.
The girl with her sewing basket by the kitchen fire.
The merchant at his desk.
 
You can pray at all times and under all circumstances.
Moses prayed  at the head of a formidable army.
Ezechia prayed in his bed afflicted is sickness.
St. Joseph prayed in his carpentry shop
St. Isadore prayed while tending his flock.
St. Rose prayed while engaged in sewing.
 
There is nothing easier than to pray.  Say to God, “Help me O Lord, Assist me, Grant me the grace to love you.”  What can be easier than this?
It is not necessary that you should always be in church or on your knees to pray.  Everyone no matter what their state in life can pray.  Each one imagines that his troubles and his particular occupation dispenses one from praying.  On the contrary, you should always pray.  Pray over the daily acts and events of your life.   Pray over your anger for this is important.  Pray without ceasing.
 
Reflection on the Text by Father Paul Robichaud CSP

Last week I had an MRI  (magnetic resonance imaging scan).  You are completely enclosed in a device, strapped down so you cannot move and then the wall panels move towards you until they almost touch your body.  I am claustrophobic and these sessions can last 30 or 45 minutes.  To make matters worse there is never just one session but a series of session where you can spend a total of one to two hours in the machine.
As I lay in the machine wondering how I would get through the next 90 minutes, I thought of something Paulist Father John Hurley said to me about his last scan.  He said, I just prayed.  So I prayed and while the time did not fly by, it certainly helped get me through this experience.
Servant of God Isaac Hecker reminds his listeners that you can always pray wherever you are and whatever you are doing.  Some people argue that their work keeps them from prayer as Hecker writes.  . Our work should be a subject of our prayer.  If prayer encompasses all of your life then there is nothing we do that we cannot bring into our praye and discuss with God.  There is nothingr that we cannot use as a platform for our prayer.
 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.
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HECKER REFLECTION: ON PRAYER

2/9/2015

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These next few weeks we will be publishing Servant of God Isaac Hecker’s notes on prayer.  They were written in 1850s and used in his early morning class on prayer that he often conducted during the Parish Missions.  Hecker would hold class often at 6am in the morning to prepare people to receive baptism, reconciliation or first communion.  The class as often a jumble of different people from potential converts to  cradle Catholics who had never received the sacraments of initiation.
 
Servant of God Isaac Hecker taught:
 
Do not imagine that because you now enjoy the grace and friendship of Almighty God that you can keep this state independently of all aid.  For to practice virtue you need the special help of God’s grace in order to persevere.  If you wish to live a good life you must pray.  For God’s assistance is obtained by prayer.  As Saint Augustine has said, “God created you without your cooperation, but he will not have you without your cooperation.” 

Even if you fail to complete the mission, forget not to pray.  Pray as Saint Catherine did.  When she sinned, she would pray, “Behold O Lord, these are the fruits of my garden, the bitter fruit of the garden of my soul.  I gave them to you in your mercy, give me the grace to do better.”

Prayer is our strength.  You may have changed your heart but the devil is not converted and neither is the world.  The devil will tempt you again and the world will try and end your prayer and seduce you again.  Your sincerity will be tried and tested.  Perhaps tomorrow.  Perhaps another day – or next week you will be assaulted by your old enemies and your old temptations.  It is only after being greatly tested that you shall receive the crown of eternal life.  For the crown is only given to those who have been in battle and have been tested and who have conquered  “Man of God must pursue justice, piety, faithfulness, love, fortitude and gentleness.  Run the great race of faith and take hold of eternal life.” (Tim 6:11)

Reflection by Fr. Paul Robichaud, CSP

In the introduction of his morning talk on prayer, Servant of God Isaac Hecker begins with the necessity of prayer.  If you are going to live a good life, you need prayer to be  a  part of it.  Hecker reminds his listeners that while an individual may change his or her heart and experience a growing closeness to God, that this relationship needs to be fed by prayer.  Our hearts may change says Hecker but the world does not and we still have to live in world that succeeds when we drift away from prayer.

The late Albert Mollegen an Episcopal priest, theologian and bibilical scholar who I had the pleasure of studying with some years ago, put it simply.  Mollegen used to say, Just pray, let is come out anyway that it can but just talk to God and God will take you from where you are to where God is.  God is so delighted to engage you that whether you know it or not, you have God’s ear.  This is reflected in Hecker’s quote from Poor Clare Saint Catherine of Bologna (1413-1463).  Saint Catherine says even bring your sins to God and ask for help and God will help you.  The saint joined the Franciscans when she was 14 and in time served as Mistress of Novices.  An excellent painter as well as a spiritual director her works and miniatures as well as her writings survive today.  She is the patron saint of artists. 

Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.

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HECKER REFLECTION: BE PERFECT

2/2/2015

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Servant of God Isaac Hecker Wrote:
 
Our Lord says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  This may appear strange that God should require us to a perfection like his own but it is not.  God’s own character is the model of man’s perfection because he created man in his own image. 
 
God’s mind is occupied in the contemplation of is own truth, wisdom and beauty, his will in loving his own goodness and both mind and will are guided by his infinite truth and goodness.  So man’s mind should be guided by the contemplataaion of God’s truth wisdom and beauty, his will to the love of God’s goodness and both mind and will be directed by obedience to God’s truth and goodness.  Man’s life would be an image of God’s life and man’s perfection would  be like that of his Father in heaven.
 
Reflection by Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP
 
To be like God, what an idea!    Some of us might wish we had the God-like power to control our world and make it respond so that everything would turn out the way we want.  Most of us understand that while God has created us, we are with our imperfections, a long way from being like God.   But the good news is as Servant of God Isaac Hecker writes that God has created us in God’s own image no matter how imperfect we are and this is our starting point.  We are created in the image of God through the loving care of the Father and we have become the adopted children of the Father through the death and resurrection of Jesus.   So as imperfect as we might be we have divine potential.
 
Father Hecker invites us to grow in God’s image.  God’s mind is occupied in the contemplation of is own truth, wisdom and beauty, his will in loving his own goodness and both mind and will are guided by his infinite truth and goodness.  So by doing what God does, as we contemplate God’s truth, for example, we grow in God’s image.
 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.

 

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PAULIST REFLECTIONS: THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE

1/25/2015

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Paulist Reflections
The Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul
January 25, 2015
An Excerpt from “Paul the Missionary” By Frank DeSiano CSP

 
Introduction by Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP:


In this essay taken from Paulist Tom Kane’s All You Holy Men and Women: A Paulist Litany of Saints (New York: Paulist Press, 2014) Paulist FrankDeSiano CSP  describes the Apostle Paul as a missionary bringing the message of God’s  free and absolute love.  The Apostle was swept away by it in his conversion.  DeSiano writes, “Do we not have to experience what Paul did?  Do we not have to be swept up and away by this empowering love?  Do we not have to let this love sear our eyes until they view the world as saturated by divine love.” Father DeSiano challenges us as members of the Paulist family to experience radical conversion.  To explore this further read the entire chapter by Father DeSiano and the document on Paulist Radical Conversion from the 2014 Paulist General Assembly.
 
Father Frank DeSiano CSP writes:
 
Paul’s message of grace – God’s totally free and gracious bestowal of absolute love – becomes both the message and the method of Paul.  Grace basically means that we are wrapped up in a field of unlimited love.  Love has to expand its circle or else it is not love.  Love has to be passionate, embracing , open and persistent.  It has to be “all things to all people.”
 
Paul missionary per excellence, can give us a very respectable way to speak about mission; its all about God’s grace.  God’s unrestricted love show in the work, death and resurrection or Jesus Christ, and given to the world through the Spirit.  This is what God has done, whether people know it or not, whether people can see it or not.  The missionary’s  task is not to berate people he or she has already judged, but to open up people to the signs of divine love already in their lives, and already working in the world.
 
We look at Paul from today’s vantage point; a world teaming with diversity, full of great dreams and dashed hopes, replete with opportunities for coming together or falling apart.  In some ways the fundamental insight of Paul – that it is all about God’s generous and unlimited love – is a message the world has barely begun to hear.  One can be passionate about grace and one can insist upon it for humankind, but how can anyone make a point of division, of violence, or separation?   For centuries right up to the Second Vatican Council, Catholic and non-Catholic Christians saw the possibility of salvation for others in only begrudging ways.
 
Do we not have to experience what Paul did?  Do we not have to be swept up and away by this empowering love?  Do we not have to let this love sear our eyes until they view the world as saturated by divine love?  Do we not have to let this love break open the stony edges of our hearts until we love as God loves?   Love can do funny things to us.  It can make us jealous or nervous or persistent or petulant.  The purer our experience of love, the more love purifies our motives, making us generous and kind and other-focused, and eager for the good of others, as Paul tells us in his hymn about love (1Cor13). 

So in the end with all that love can make us, it can also make us missionaries, bearers of divine love to the world as generously and graciously as God has done this in Jesus, not resting until “God may be “all in all.” (1 Cor 15:28) that is until absolute love may be all in all.

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HECKER REFLECTION: HOLY NAME OF JESUS PT.2

1/20/2015

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The Most Holy Name of Jesus
A Sermon by Servant of God, Isaac Hecker
(Part Two of Three:  19 January 2015). 

 
Jesus ‘humanity is exalted above all creatures and he has been appointed the Supreme Judge of all men, both the living and the dead.   As is His humanity is elevated above all, so also is his sacred name honored above  all other names and so it is worthy of the homage of every creature.  In the words of Saint Paul, “he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, wherefore God has exalted him and has given him a name which is above all names, so that in the name of Jesus, every knee should bend.” 
 
He shall be called Jesus because he shall save his people from their sins.  In this name then is comprised the entire mystery of our redemption.  In this name we have unfolded God’s love and mercy.  In this name we recognize our greatest happiness, freedom from the slavery of sin.  The name had not been known to the Jews.  The name had not been unknown to the Jews, the name had existed in the person of Joshua of Jeptha and of Jesus the son of Sirach.  But these are mere shadows or at best a deliverer from temporal calamities.  With our Blessed Lord His name was the Truth. 
 
In that name we have a development of all the details in the history of the God-Man.  He was born in poverty and nurtured in want and affliction, because He is our Savior.  He was arrested, falsely accused, cruelly tormented and ignominiously put to death.  His holy name explains the mystery, accounts for all the atrocities that he endured.  If He rises glorious and triumphant from the dead, if He has resuced us from the slavery of evil.  If He has purchased for us a share in the glories of his heavenly home, it is all the fultillment of the meaning of his blessed and adorable name.  It is in this great name in which the apostle assures us we are only to be saved.  That holy name is a part of every blessing.  In that name we are born again unto God.  It is the past name on the lips of his devout servants, when the shadow of death is falling thick and fast about him.  So too the history of God’s saints enables us to see how great a weapon was in all their temptations, how signal were the victories its pious use enabled them to gain, how deep and pure was the reverence it engendered.  And this should be our attitude, our feelings in this regard.  Let us cherish and cultivate warmth and affection  for the name which bring goodness to us. Let it be our ambition to increase and strengthen our veneration for that blessed name which is exalted above all other names.
 
Our Holy Church calls upon all her faithful children who know and love  the sacred name to make a time of reparation for the blasphemous and irreverent use of the name.  We must admit with grief and sorrow that this irreverence is far from US.  I suppose that there are a few of us who have not experienced the frequent profanation of the name by those who should know better; those who bow their heads with reverence in the house of God and who then go to their homes and their daily occupations to offer insult to their God and scandal to their neighbor by their profane use of the blessed name.  Every outburst is coupled with the name of the Redeemer.  No words of mine are needed to portray this heinous vice.  The command of the Almighty is clear, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.´ 
 
Commentary by Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP
 
In the Book of Exodus, when Moses went up to Mount Sinai he did something very daring, he asked God what God’s name was.   This would allow Moses to call on God, to get God’s attention and perhaps to get God to assist him with divine power.  God answers Moses by saying, “I am who I am.”  It would in time be translated as “Yahweh.”  Here in Father Hecker’s sermon, he tells us that can call upon God through the name of Jesus.  Not only is God’s name holy but it is powerful.  Father Hecker reminds us that we need to respect the sacred name of God. 
 
The Holy Name Society was founded by the Dominicans in 1564.  Its purpose was to deepen devotion to the name of Jesus Christ and to make reparation for the misuse of the holy name.  Member pledged not to swear or misuse the name of Jesus.  The society was introduced in the United States in the Archdiocese of New York in 1898 and any parish in America was free to establish a society.  By the time that Vatican Council II was called, some 60 years later, American membership had reached five million members who were primarily men.  Most parishes in the United States formed a men’s group called the Holy Name Society that encouraged members to receive the sacraments regularly.  While Holy Name Societies are not as popular in parishes today as they were before Vatican II, they continue to encourage Catholics not to swear, lie or blaspheme the name of God.  In the parish of Saint Paul the Apostle in Manhattan the Paulist staff added an additional pledge not to drink alcohol as well as not to swear.   Servant of God Father Hecker  established a men’s society in the 1870s that would in time become the Holy Name society, as he believed that this helped reduce domestic violence among Catholic families in the tenements that were located in the parish on the west side of Manhattan.  By the time that Father Hecker died in 1888, the parish was one of the most active parishes in the United States.
 
 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.

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HECKER REFLECTION: HOLY NAME OF JESUS

1/12/2015

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The Most Holy Name of Jesus
A Sermon by Servant of God, Isaac Hecker
(Part One:  12 January 2015)

 
“From the rising of the sun until its going down, the name of the Lord is worthy of praise.”
(Psalm 113)
 
The devout Christian who has learned to know the Redeemer, comprehends the glory and happiness of Christ’s love for us.  Every feast in Christ’s honor is celebrated with unspeakable spiritual joy and devotion.  The feast of the Holy Name which we celebrate today is one of special glory because its focus is Christmas.  Every mystery of Christ, every mercy, every title of honor, every benefit, every effort of divine love which we adore forms a whole sequence of our redemption and justification.  The sacred name of Jesus presents to our minds the majesty and glory of his divinity while at the same time we are aware of the endearing charms of his sacred humanity.  His name is the title of his supreme majesty and dominion, his glorious victory over sin while at the same time it is to us the expression of all graces and blessings of which he is the inexhaustible source.
 
In times past we have directed our attention on this feast to the contemplation of the great mystery of the Incarnation.  We have celebrated with joy and gladness the festival of the birth of the eternal Son of God the Father among us.  On this occasion he first shed his precious blood in the feast of the circumcision and we have come with the wise men from the East to adore Him and lay our treasures at His feet.  Today holy mother church invites us to pay homage to his sacred name.  The church seeks to cherish and to direct our love and veneration to that blessed name and together to increase our reverence for it.  Surely there is no one among us, no one worthy of the name of Christian  who needs to be reminded of why this sacred name is venerated.
 
In the first place it comes from God Himself.  It was necessary for God the Father to give a name to Him who is the Son of God.  It was necessary that the Father give the name to His own Son, for God alone understood the consubstantial eternal Word, the boundless perfection of His divine nature and the unsearchable mystery of the Incarnation and His office as the Redeemer of the world.   Therefore was this glorious name conceived in the infinite intelligence of the Almighty.  Therefore was it declared by the ministry of an angel that He should be called Jesus because He will save His people from their sins.  Therefore it becomes to us to honor and revere this name that comes from a source which none can be higher or more exalted.
 
Commentary by Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP
 
The feast of the Holy Name of Jesus has its origin in the New Testament.  In the Gospel of Luke an angel tells Mary that God has chosen a name for the infant and this same message is delivered to Joseph in the Gospel of Matthew.  Saint Matthew also discusses the meaning of the two names of the child, “Jesus” for “Yahweh saves” and “Emmanuel” for “God is with us.”  Father Hecker makes the same point  in his sermon when he states that God the Father has named  God the Son - who is the Word of God made flesh.  In chapter 16 of the Gospel of John, Jesus says ”whatever you ask in my name, my Father will give you.”  This same point is made by Paul in his letter to the Romans.  This is the origin of ending prayers in a variety of styles such as “in his most holy name,” or “through Christ Our Lord.”  Reverence for the name of Jesus goes back to early Christianity.
 
At the time of Father Hecker, a feast day had been set aside during the Christmas season for the Holy Name of Jesus.  In time it was eventually merged with the feast of the Circumcision and today has replaced this feast day, de-emphasizing the circumcision rite and like Father Hecker’s sermon, placing emphasis on the power of the name of God.  Just as Moses asked God for his name on Sinai so that Moses could call upon him, so Christians know the name of the God man and live in the grace, blessing and power of his name.
 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.

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ISAAC HECKER: SERMON ON THE IMAGE OF GOD

1/6/2015

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Sermon for Epiphany,
Servant of God Isaac Hecker CSP

Excerpts from a Sermon delivered at the Church of San Andrea delle Valle in Rome.

It he beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  God then created man in his own image and likeness.  From the subsistence of the earth God made man’s body.  Out of God’s own bosom He breathed the breath of his own life into man, and man became a living soul!  Where did man’s life come?  From God’s own bosom.  For the soul finds no rest until it finds God and reposes in that bosom out of which its life was first breathed forth.  The breath of God still moves in us.  Reason seeks to know God.  The heart longs to possess God.  This is the great yearning of all souls; the meaning of the hope of every human heart.  The destiny of the soul is to come to God; to be one with God.

Christianity teaches that the soul is the image of God, His living image and likeness.  The image has the capacity to take on its original, therefore unions with the soul and God is not impossible.  God has united His Divinity with all the infinite attributes of our humanity without change or alteration of either, in one personality.  This is called the Incarnation.  God became man.  There was one who was true God and true man, hi is called Christ

Look at the Gospels from this point of view.  Our Lord is introduced to us as a true child of an earthly mother, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger.  He was not above participation in social amusements and gave his sanction to a marriage ceremony and to further the enjoyment of the guests, at the suggestion of his mother, he change water into wine.  His eyes were open to the beauties of nature.  He was charmed with the lilies, studied trees, read the meaning  of clouds, watched the birds build their nests and listened with delight to their cheering song.  The sowing of seed, the ripening harvest the plays and dancing in the marketplace; these and all the varied events of daily life and of human interest, attracted his attention and furnished illustrations for those parables s of his in which he conveyed to men his sublimist of lessons.

It was attached to the city of Jerusalem.  He was fond of children.  His heart was alive to the feelings of friends.  He pitied and blessed the poor, comforted those who mourned and refreshed those who were weary.  Jesus was a man whose eyes were open to all things beautiful and whose heart was filled with human tenderness and feeling.  Why do men think that this life has nothing to do with the next?  If so they are greatly mistaken.  God is the author of nature.  How admirable is God’s name in all his works.  Man is born into the masterpiece of the visible creation, his soul bears the image of his maker and his faculties are a gift from God.

 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.

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ISAAC HECKER: A SERMON ON CHRISTMAS

12/14/2014

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A Sermon on Christmas
Servant of God, Isaac Thomas Hecker
Church of Saint Paul the Apostle, New York, Christmas Day 1870

 
The following is an edited version of a sermon delivered by Father Hecker on Christmas Day 1870.  It is the only surviving sermon of Hecker on the subject of Christmas.  It is provided here as a single sermon in three sections.  This will allow you to copy or quote from it in its entirety in whatever form you may choose during the Christmas season. 



Christmas

I

God became man to facilitate man’s love for God.  For had God become an angel and made himself visible to us, we would have been bound to love Him just as  much as we are bound to love Him as a man.  However this would have been more difficult for resemblance begets love.  Thus when we seek to attract the attention of another or win their love, we seek to resemble them in our dress, our conduct, our speech and in all things.  Just as a mother prattles with her child to gain attention and awaken  its affection, so Christ takes the form of a servant being made in the likeness of men to captivate our hearts.

Christ was really truly man and being man bound us to love him not only by the law of resemblance, but by the strongest of ties.  For it is the law of nature that “like loves like.”  Birds love birds.  Beasts love beasts, man loves man.  God as man can bind us to Himself with cords of common sympathy, calls forth a spontaneous devotion and awakes the deepest and warmest affections of our hearts.

God is shrouded in our common humanity.  Christ is our brother who we can approach with feelings of confidence and affection.  When the Indians go out to hunt the buffalo, they cover themselves with buffalo skin.  By this device they lose their fear of the animal and are allowed to approach near enough to shoot them.  So Our Blessed Lord approaches us without awaking our fears, covers Himself with our humanity and captivates our hearts with the fire of His divine love.  O blessed hunter of the hearts of man!   O goodness and kindness of our God and Saviour.

 
II

The invisible became visible, God became man.  Can the treasure of God’s infinite love be exhausted?  Can God do more than this to win back His creatures?  Yes!  For God’s love acknowledges no limit and nothing is impossible with God.  God can become a babe!  For love not only surrenders itself to the object loved but surrenders itself in the form most attractive to the object loved.  For in an infant we see all that is good, lovely and sweet in human nature without all that is repulsive.

Where is there a human heart that can resist this strategy of Divine love?  The Almighty God as a helpless infant!  Truly God has made himself of no account for our sakes.  Look at the infant laying in the cold straw, in the poor crib, in the inclement stable!  Who is so poor as to not learn a lesson in poverty?  Who is so timid that fears to approach this helpless babe as he stretches out his little hands to show us love?

Do you not see O sinner that God has chosen a cave to come to us because it is open, so that we might have access to Him and request His pardon for our sins and be restored to His love?  “Don’t fear me for I am helpless,” he cries.  “Can you doubt that I entrust myself to you?”

Is this the same God who cried out to Adam after his fall and made the earth tremble?  It is !  But not as Judge and Punisher but as Saviour, the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.  The Divine Lover of souls!

 
III

“Peace on earth to men of good will.”  Peace.  This is what all seek and not find.  For God alone is its giver.  For peace springs alone from the reconciliation with man and only God can produce this.  O blessed peace, peace with God, a foretaste of Paradise! O blessed peace, peace among men, a heaven upon the earth! “Peace on earth.”  The earth had no peace without God

Before the birth of the Saviour the state of the earth was war, and today the state of nations which have abandoned the Saviour since his birth, is war.  Might made right not truth and justice.  So it is today.  For Christ is the peace of the world.  His kingdom is peace on earth.

“To men of good will.”  Good will to all who earnestly and sincerely seek God.  To all, whether Jew or Gentile, Christian or non-Christian for God is the Father of all and no respecter of persons.

O sweet infant Saviour, give to us that peace which you came to bring on the earth.  Peace to the young and the old, to the poor and the sick, to the sorrowful and to all of good will.  Peace on earth to all nations, especially to Your Holy Church (Papal States) and to Your Vicar the Pope who like You suffers from the hands of others.[1]  Peace to the world at war that your kingdom may begin! 

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HECKER REFLECTION: GOD'S CREATION

12/9/2014

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Servant of God Isaac Hecker Wrote:



“God does not despise what He created”
 
 Our Lord does not tell us to close our eyes to the beauty of the world rather he invites us to the contrary.  “Behold the lilies of the field.”  God does not despise what He created.  True devotion does not despise the beauties of nature.  The object of asceticism is not the destruction of our nature but the restitution of its relationship to all things.   
 
There are persons who imagine that you cannot have holiness without destroying something, whether it is the impulses, instincts or the propensities of our nature.  Someone cannot be a saint unless they neither eat or drink or sleep or shut their eyes to the beauty and the glories of God’s creation.
 
It is true that these practices may be found among the lives of the saints, but these are exceptions.  Sanctity by no means requires these extraordinary things and many of the saints who did these were the most natural people in the world.  You will not find a soul more alive to the beauties of nature than Saint Francis of Assisi who like the psalmist, composed a song calling on all nature to praise and bless its maker; who called on the elements of nature in affectionate terms such as brother and sister, and when near death sent to a message to a lady in Rome to make him some cakes as she had when he visited her home.
 
Response by Rev. Paul Robichaud CSP


Servant of God Isaac Hecker challenged the influence of Calvinism in American thought; for it was a dominant element in the Protestant Christianity of his time.  For Hecker human rights derived from the idea that people were basically good and would grow to be even better through the exercise of freedom.  Yet John Calvin held that humankind was depraved and sinful.  Father Hecker taught that in Catholic thought people were considered good; for they had been born again in baptism and made new.  Salvaion was open to all in Catholic thought and therefore made Catholicism a better choice to be the principal religion of the American people.  People were free because they were basically good and their goodness grew in the exercise of their freedom.  This was both American and Catholic.
During this Advent and Christmas season we celebrate the good news that God had become human in Jesus Christ so that humankind could be like God.  This message of Christmas is at the heart of the Catholic faith and at the heart of Catholic spirituality.  Father Hecker reminds us in today’s reflection that holiness is found all around us; for grace is present in the things that God has made.  God has made us and we can find in ourselves that same grace present in creation.  God does not seek to destroy our nature but to restore it.  Let us take this message of Christmas into the new year.
 
Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.

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HECKER REFLECTION: THE DEVIL IS LIKE A DOG

12/1/2014

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Servant of God Isaac Hecker Wrote:



The devil is like a dog, he only barks at strangers and he only bites those who don’t belong to his house.
 
Why does God allow us to be tempted?
First, to establish in us a deep foundation of humility.  Even Saint Peter having promised Jesus that he would never deny him, fell when tempted by the servant girl.
Second, to increase our sense of detachment, for our detachment from sin is not perfect until we have forgotten ourselves in God.
Third, to increase our merit, as we find in the letter of James (1:12), “Blessed is the one who endures temptation, for having been tested, he shall receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.”
 
Origen says: “If I were strong enough to overcome Lucifer I would gain his seat in heaven.  For as one overcomes a powerful devil, so the higher will be your seat in heaven among the angels.”
Saint Anselm says, “Not to experience temptation is to be an angel,  To experience temptations and to overcome them is to be a Christian.  To experience temptations and to consent to them is to act like a devil.”

 
A Response from Paul Robichaud CSP:
 
               Servant of God Father Isaac Hecker uses a string of sayings to talk about temptation to sin.  He starts with a folksy reference to barking dogs.   People who own dogs know that as a part of the family and can be very protective.    A reflection in the window or a strange noise at the door can cause them to bark and growl.  Hecker uses this as an example of how we experience temptation. “The devil only barks at strangers” Is a wonderful phrase, meaning the more you are a part of God’s family the more you will experience temptation.   
 
               Hecker makes three points.   We are tempted by evil to remind us not to be too proud.  Temptations come at all ages and at all points in life and they remind us that we still have a lot of growing to do.   Secondly, we are tempted by evil to remind us to not be too comfortable with our lives.  A point similar to the first.  Part of our Christian discipleship is a call to live for and in God.  When God comes first in our lives, sin cannot influence us.   But when God comes first in our lives, evil will work its hardest to get us to sin.  It is a struggle that takes a lifetime of faith, hope and love.  Hecker writes, that lastly we are tempted by evil as a way of growing in holiness.  For the more we resist sin and live in grace the closer we grow to God.   There is an irony here.  The more we live for God, the more we will be tempted, yet the more we are tempted and resist, the more we live for God


Paulist Father Paul Robichaud CSP is Historian of the Paulist Fathers and Postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington D.C.

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