Today is the

Feast of Our Lady of the Angels of the Portiuncula.

It's a day to celebrate all churches, friaries, hermitages

(like this one), apostolates, etc that take their name from

Our Lady of the Angels of the Portiuncula.

Happy Feast Day!

“The Portiuncula [Little Portion] was an old church dedicated to the Virgin Mother of God which was abandoned. Francis had a great devotion to the Queen of the world and when he saw that the church was deserted, he began to live there constantly in order to repair it. He heard that the angels often visited it, so that it used to be called St. Mary of the Angels, and he decided to stay there permanently out of reverence for the angels and love for the Mother of Christ. He loved this spot more than any other in the world. It was here that he began his religious life in a very small way; it was here that he came to a happy end. When he was dying, he commended this spot above all others to the friars, because it was most dear to the Blessed Virgin.

This was the place where St. Francis founded the Order of Friars Minor by divine inspiration and it was divine providence which led him to repair three churches before he founded the Order and began to preach the Gospel. This meant that he progressed from material things to more spiritual achievements, from lesser to greater, in due order, and it gave a prophetic indication of what he would accomplish later.

As he was living there by the church of our Lady, Francis prayed to her who had conceived the Word, full of grace and truth, begging her insistently and with tears to become his advocate. Then he was granted the true spirit of the Gospel by the intercessions of the Mother of Mercy and he brought it to fruition.

He embraced the Mother of our Lord Jesus with indescribable love because, as he said, it was she who made the Lord of majesty our brother, and through her we found mercy. After Christ, he put all his trust in her and took her as his patroness for himself and his friars.” ~St. Bonaventure

John answered, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:27-30).

After the past couple days’ worth of shout outs from friends in the blogosphere (I can't provide you with links because I don't know how to make a link link from within the body of this post), and after I sent a few dozen email to whomever I could think of, complete with links to the above mentioned shout outs, (an embarrassing display of shameless self-promotion on my part, I now admit), I asked the Lord for a word to help me get back to right size. My evil twin, Ego, has a rather fat head to begin with, so I decided he needed something to focus on besides those blogs to keep his head from exploding!

Instead of a Scripture passage to claim as a “power verse,” and rather than pointing me to an episode of ego deflation in the life of one of the saints, our Blessed Lord gave me instead a poem by Emily Dickinson to prayerfully ponder.

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

So today I'm back to practicing being a Nobody for Christ. May I decrease that He might increase (cf. John 3:30).

And all God’s people said... AMEN!

"Where humility is combined with the remembrance of God that is established through watchfulness and attention, and also with recurrent prayer inflexible in its resistance to the enemy, there is the place of God, the heaven of the heart in which because of God's presence no demonic army dares to make a stand."

~St. Philotheos of Sinai

Dear brothers and sisters, let us ask the Lord to make us rediscover the importance of nourishing ourselves not only with bread, but with truth, with love, with Christ, with the body of Christ, faithfully participating in the Eucharist with keen understanding, to be ever more intimately united with him. In fact, it is not the eucharistic food that is changed into us, but rather we who are mysteriously transformed by it. Christ nourishes us by uniting us to himself; he draws us into himself. ~Pope Benedict XVI

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence, there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling the silence of life with sound, productive by turning all life's leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. If we have no silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will seem silently to withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty. ~Thomas Merton

Sin is the greatest disaster. ~St. Bernadette

"In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished." ~Walker Percy