Blessed are you, Lord God,
Father all-holy,
for your boundless love
The tree, once the source of shame
and death for humankind,
has become the cross
of our redemption and life.
When his hour had come to
return to you in glory,
the Lord Jesus,
Our King, our Priest, and our Teacher,
freely mounted the scaffold of the cross
and made it his royal throne,
his altar of sacrifice, his pulpit of truth.
On the cross,
lifted above the earth,
he triumphed over our age-old enemy.
Cloaked in his own blood,
he drew all things to himself.
On the cross,
he opened out his arms
and offered you his life;
the sacrifice of the New Law
that gives to the sacraments
their saving power.
On the cross,
he proved what he had prophesied:
the grain of wheat must die
to bring forth an abundant harvest.
Father,
we honour this cross as the sign
of our redemption.
May we reap the harvest of salvation
planted in pain by Christ Jesus.
May our sins be nailed to his cross,
the power of life released,
pride conquered,
and weakness turned to strength.
May the cross be our comfort in trouble,
our refuge in the face of danger,
our safeguard on life’s journey
until you welcome us to
our heavenly home.
O LORD, Master of my life,
grant that I may not be infected with the
spirit of slothfulness and inquisitiveness,
with the spirit of ambition and vain talking.
{Making a prostration}
Grant instead to me, your servant,
the spirit of purity and of humility,
the spirit of patience and neighborly love.
{Making a third prostration}
O Lord and King,
grant me the grace of being aware of my sins
and of not thinking evil of those of my brethren.
For you are blessed, now and ever, and forever.
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, King of Kings,
You have power over life and death.
You know what is secret and hidden,
and neither our thoughts nor our feelings
are concealed from You.
Cure me of duplicity;
I have done evil before You.
Now my life declines from day to day
and my sins increase.
O Lord, God of souls and bodies,
You know the extreme frailty of my soul and my flesh.
Grant me strength in my weakness, O Lord,
and sustain me in my misery.
Give me a grateful soul that I may
never cease to recall Your benefits,
O Lord most bountiful.
Be not mindful of my many sins,
but forgive me all my misdeeds.
O Lord, disdain not my prayer –
the prayer of a wretched sinner;
sustain me with Your grace until the end,
that it may protect me as in the past.
It is Your grace which has taught me wisdom;
blessed are they who follow her ways,
for they shall receive the crown of glory.
In spite of my unworthiness,
I praise You and I glorify You,
O Lord, for Your mercy to me is without limit.
You have been my help and my protection.
May the name of Your majesty be praised forever.
To you, our God, be glory.
Amen.
After the previously-planned interview fell through at the last minute, David sat down to record a solo episode to talk about his newborn son, Sidecar Day, blue flowers in Narnia, and also to make his tongue-in-cheek case as to why C.S. Lewis is better than J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Gray Havens are an American Christian folk pop husband and wife duo, David and Licia Radford, from Crystal Lake, Illinois. On October 8th they will be releasing their new album, Blue Flower, so David Radford came on the show to talk to Andrew and David about how C.S. Lewis inspired their recent work.
As we approach the end of Season 4, David is joined on the show by Michael “Gomer” Gormley. Among other things, they discuss Ted Lasso, tea, and the Atonement. Also, find out what Gomer would do if he ever became the Pope!
New York Times bestselling author, Patti Callahan, returns to the show to talk about her forthcoming book, “Once Upon A Wardrobe”, which will be released on October 19th.
A few months ago, John and Greta from The Tolkien Road podcast did a series of episodes on religion in Tolkien’s Legendarium. David invited him onto the show to talk about those episodes and to encourage the Pints With Jack listeners to listen to them.
Author Rod Bennett joined David to talk about a presentation on he gave at a big Christian rock festival about C.S. Lewis’ relationship to “Pulp Fiction”.
A little while ago, there was a film released called The Bucket List, starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. In the movie, both characters are diagnosed with a terminal illness and, as a result, they decide to write a “bucket list” – a list of things which they want to do before “kicking the bucket”…
If you google “bucket lists”, you will find them on many blogs. If you read a lot of them (and I have), you start to notice some commonalities among them. As in the film, the common theme that runs through all of them is that they are attempts to really try and experience the depth and breadth that that the world has to offer and to truly suck the marrow out of life.
In this post I would like to give a little bit of my testimony. The full story of my faith journey is obviously quite long, so today I would just like to share with you the genesis of my walk with God.
“In The Beginning…” – Genesis 1:1
I grew up in a home with a mother who was a practising Catholic and a father of somewhat nominal Anglican background. My mother took my sister and me to Mass every week and always encouraged both of us in our faith. At our parish, my sister sang in the choir and I was an altar server. Some of the most vivid memories of my childhood are of the three of us praying together at home and singing along in the car with Psalty the Singing Songbook … 🙂
As a teenager I never had any real rebellion against religion. Sure, I had some doubts at times, but on the whole I enjoyed going to Mass. I took my altar serving duties very seriously and enjoyed the stillness of the Saturday Vigil and the otherwordliness of the Sunday morning celebrations at the Abbey Church.
I then went to University. Although I had been a believer up until this point and prayed pretty regularly, something was about to change…
In my second year of university I moved out of the campus accommodation into a house that was owned by, and situated next to, a Catholic church in the city. As well as having a student Mass, a prayer group was inaugurated shortly after my arrival by an Irish missionary named Maeve who played a significant role in my formation while at University. It was at one of these tiny prayer meetings, in the small back room of the church, that my faith was ignited.
The format of the prayer group was as follows. After an opening prayer, one of the Verbum Dei missionaries would give a short reflection on a particular topic, such as “The Holy Spirit” or “Faith”. Afterwards we would spend some time in silence reading a handout containing some verses of Scripture related to the topic for that week.
Called By Name
It was during one of these times of silence that my eyes came to rest upon the following passage from the prophet Jeremiah:
The word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
– Jeremiah 1:5
This wasn’t an unfamiliar passage to me – I had taken Religious Studies at school and learned a whole bunch of Scripture by heart for my exams. However, that night, those words had special power in them. This wasn’t just something God had said to Jeremiah in Judah in ~600 BC, but it was something that He was saying to me in that little room, that night, two and a half thousand years later.
Restless Heart
That night I truly knew that I was known by God and that my life had purpose. It was like someone had turned on a homing beacon inside of me. Sixteen hundred years earlier, St. Augustine wrote in his “Confessions”:
“You made us for Yourself O Lord, and our hearts will wander restless…until we rest in You”
That night I began to recognise the deep restlessness of my heart, and the space inside it that only God could fill. And so began my adult journey of faith and my love affair with Sacred Scripture. The Word is “alive” indeed…
The other day I was having lunch with a friend and, out of the blue, she asked me: “What’s the most important quality you look for in a wife?”
Americans! Sheesh! Whatever happened to polite conversation about the weather?!
I did have to chuckle a bit though… You see, at the moment I’m spending some time reassessing and discerning again my vocation – married life, priestly life, religious life or consecrated celibacy. Therefore, questions regarding the qualities of a future wife may well be, at this point, moot.
“She is worth far more than rubies…”
But I also laughed because of the various texts which flashed through my mind when she asked this question. One such text was from the Book of Proverbs:
“Who can find a worthy woman?” – Proverbs 31:10 (ESV)
Who indeed?! 😉
I can still remember when, at university, I was asked to be a Reader one evening and I encountered this scripture for the first time. I had to read this passage at Mass without sniggering. I won’t lie, it was kinda hard…
Yesterday was the Feast of St. Lawrence, so to mark this occasion I thought I would give a quick “tip of the hat” to another Lawrence, Dr. Lawrence Feingold.
Now, I’ve never actually met Dr. Feingold, but I have heard many of his talks and they’ve all been, without exception, brilliant. He comes across as unassuming, yet he clearly knows his stuff and is genuinely excited by the material he’s presenting.
I can’t recall exactly how it came about, but towards the end of 2009 I followed a hyperlink that took me to the website belonging to The Association of Hebrew Catholics. On that website I found the first couple of lectures by Dr. Feingold in his series “Themes of the Early Church Fathers“. I liked his tone and style immediately. At that time I had just started to discover these early Christian writers and Dr. Feingold’s series was a superb catalyst in helping familiarize me with the Early Church.
My mum sent me this lovely quotation the other day from the late Cardinal Basil Hume:
Once, while preaching in a parish, I suddenly caught sight of a young mother with her child, and you could see the love between them. I was terribly tempted to say to the Congregation: ‘Forget what I am saying and look over there, and you will see what we mean to God’” – Cardinal Basil Hume.
This week was the feast day of St. Dominic, so I thought I would share a rather religiously nerdy joke I came across recently…
A Dominican and a Jesuit were arguing about whether the Dominicans or the Jesuits were more favored by God. Finally, they decided that the only one who could settle the matter was God. So they prayed, the heavens opened up, and a piece of paper came fluttering down. When they picked it up, this is what it said:
My children,
Please stop quarreling about such absurd and trivial matters. Sincerely,
Lists and buckets
The other day I was having lunch with a friend and, out of the blue, she asked me: 
Yesterday was the Feast of 
