Happy Feast of the Annunciation. Our Lord, while remaining what He had always been, became something He had not been: One of us. His humanity, His human nature, His human body, were begotten this day. The Word became flesh, from the flesh of a woman, by the power of the Holy Ghost, and dwelt among us. He came into the world through the “Yes” of a woman, and she greatly desires to reconcile you, to Him, through her.
During the Miraculous Medal visions, when she was shown the model to be cast, Saint Catherine Labouré noticed that some of the rays streaming from the hands of the Blessed Mother towards earth did not reach all the way to the globe. Saint Catherine asked why this was so, and the BVM replied:
“Those are the graces for which people forget to ask.”
Pray, pray, pray! It’s so worth it. With our access to the sacraments being limited by outside forces, do you really think this makes God powerless? Now I see some dioceses are even eliminating or limiting Confession. This may or may not be the end times; that’s not for us to know. But the sort of things we are seeing in the world right now seem similar to what the actual end times will look like. You are going to need extra graces, and they are being offered. It is time to double down, dig in, and fight. Any suffering that comes your way is meant to be transformed into love, and united with the love shown to us from the Cross. Seek that union.
Certainly you have many people in your life who need prayers. Imagine those who are panicked, who fear death, but don’t have the supernatural faith which brings peace. It must be terrifying. Pray for them even more than you normally do, for their conversion or reversion. Also pray for the poor souls who are stoking this fear, inciting this panic, on purpose.
But first and foremost, take care of yourself. It’s not selfish, it’s your duty. “Secure your own mask first, before helping others.” Remember that.
“Secure your own mask first, before helping others.”
I fly around 120K miles a year for my day job, so I hear that phrase a lot. Maybe that’s why when I heard it referenced by Ann Barnhardt in a podcast earlier this week, it just sort of went right past me. The analogy was referring to the need to make sure your own faith, soul, prayer life, etc is well taken care of as prerequisite to anything else.
That same day, I went off to Confession, as I had already planned to do. The penance was totally focused on the need to pray for my own needs, and really making it a priority. The priest asked me if I had prayed my daily Rosary yet, and I told him I had not (I love that at the FSSP parish, it’s just assumed you’re praying a daily Rosary). He instructed me to go offer my Rosary, entrusting to our Blessed Mother the channeling of all necessary graces for my spiritual benefit.
The podcast and the Confession should both have been a big wake up call. But the full gravity of the situation didn’t really hit me until about halfway through that Rosary when I realized, slap upside the head, I actually could not remember the last time I prayed the Rosary entirely for myself. The Holy Ghost always knows when you need a slap upside the head. Now you already know how much I love the Rosary, so you can imagine how odd this seemed to me. I mean, obviously I’ve prayed a decade or two as a penance, for an increase in this virtue or that, but a whole Rosary just for me? I can’t remember the last time, and that’s a real problem.
In Spiritual Warfare, the Rosary is a weapon of mass destruction. I’ve written about it many times in these pages. It’s a real weapon, not a metaphorical weapon. So much so, it almost seems selfish to offer it entirely for yourself. But it’s never selfish to pray for yourself, so long as your intention is in accord with God’s will. And we need not worry about petitioning something against His will, because He’s not granting that anyway. Of course in the individual prayers of the Rosary, the Our Fathers and Hail Marys, we are praying for ourselves within those prayers. But what I am talking about here are specific, personal, spiritual intentions beyond what is asked in those prayers.
I would be willing to bet that most Catholics who are somewhat secure in their faith, who are honestly trying to live authentic Christian lives, and who have managed by the grace of God to overcome a whole bunch of entrenched wretchedness, don’t pray for themselves nearly enough. We foolishly think we’ve extracted ourselves permanently from said wretchedness and we’re now “saved”. Not in the proddy sense of “once saved always saved”, but rather in the sense of “thanks to my hard conversion/reversion to the one true faith, even though I still fall sometimes, and even though I’m totally unworthy of the honor, I am now on the side of the angels and God will surely grant me final perseverance.”
Oh man, that is so dangerous. It’s for very good reason that Jesus taught us to pray to the Father to deliver us not into temptation, and that we ask Mary to pray for us at the hour of our death. It’s for very good reason that in the Roman Canon itself, during the Hanc Igitur, the priest and faithful pray to be saved from eternal damnation and be counted among the elect. Damnation is a real possibility if we so choose it, and “once saved always saved” is one of the most pernicious lies ever told. If you are truly living an authentic Christian life, Satan views you as a hard target; he knows he needs to deploy extra resources to bring you down, and deploy he will. He’s already won the soft targets without even trying, so he’s got extra munitions reserved for you. Meditate on the blitzkrieg he has planned for the hour of your death. Be terrified by this, and use the terror to build your counterattack.
With everything that’s going on right now, all of the “confusion” surrounding all aspects of the Bergolian antipapacy, Satan is squealing with delight and has launched a huge offensive. Bergoglio himself is a soft target for Satan, easily manipulated and used to destroy souls on a horrific scale. He is a soft target not only because he is an arch-heretic and profoundly stupid, but because he does not have the supernatural protection afforded to the holder of the Petrine office, due to his invalid election. Now, when this is the unmistakable reality of the Catholic Church today, the one true Church founded by God Incarnate, do you think perhaps the effects of this might be rather… widespread? The past nearly five years since the failed partial resignation of Pope Benedict has literally been, pun intended, a huge coming out party for all manner of perversion and reprobation; a spiraling tempest of filth. Do you want a sense of how long ago five years was? Five years ago, Hillary Clinton was campaigning AGAINST same-sex “marriage.” Yeah. The ever quickening pace of events across all sectors of civilization is so breathtaking, you would be delusional to think it’s not all connected. The demonic activity is everywhere and is even palpable at times. PALPABLE. Have you felt it? Every solid priest I speak with confirms they feel it too.
So there is certainly no shortage of things to pray about. And while some of this is about prioritization, it’s also about recognizing your role at the tip of the spear. We need to militantly pursue our own spiritual perfection first and foremost. It might not seem right when it first hits your ear, but if we are too busy praying for everyone else at the expense of praying for ourselves, it does everyone a disservice. This may sound uncharitable or lacking humility, but that’s not the case, because it necessarily means expanding our own prayer life. The mere fact that you are here, reading this tiny, tiny blog right now, means you are probably the tip of the spear. Proper training is essential. By calling down these graces in petition, and cooperating with them, our own increase in holiness in turn makes our prayers for others more efficacious. Everybody wins.
You are part of a very small, elite, specialized unit. This is the greatest battle ever fought, because the results of this battle are eternal. You need to be on your game.
St Michael the Archangel, pray for us
St Joan of Arc, pray for us
St Martin of Tours, pray for us
St Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us
Christ, have mercy on us
Mark, I gotta say, great post. You posted something like this maybe a year ago, and it hit me hard then, and this hits me hard today. You’re right, I need it, and I deny it to myself with the thought in the back of my mind being “so and so needs it more,” or “don’t be selfish.”
I know an old bitter sedevacantist guy, and he I remember him saying to me, in response to me saying I’d pray for him, “I don’t need it, pray for someone who needs it.” He’s also said he doesn’t need to go to confession because he doesn’t sin anymore. None of us want to end up like this.
oh…I see now on rereading that you reposted that article you wrote, and it was more than a year ago!