17 June 2021 · 2021-06 newsletter
Family, be what you are: Domestic Church
Dear Schoenstatt Family and Friends,
Greetings and blessings from the Shrine for this Covenant day – 18th June. The month of June is dedicated to the Feast of The Sacred Heart of Jesus which we celebrated on 11th June
Father Kentenich believed that love for Mary leads to a profound and warm love for Jesus Christ. He always showed Jesus Christ in his threefold relationship: to the Father in heaven, to Mary and to human beings.
In the following text he speaks of the depth of Jesus’ love for each of us:
"Just as I have loved you," our Lord once told his disciples, "you also should love one another" (Jn. 13, 34). Whoever wants to know in detail how our Lord loves, need only open the Bible, God’s letter to his children. They will soon submit joyfully to the generous, sympathetic and heroic love with which our Lord expressed his love so richly in word and deed.
1. His love is generous. That is why he invites us with so much kindness: "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Mt 11, 28). He called himself the Good Shepherd who searches for the lost lamb, who does not avoid the heat of the desert or the thickets in order to find it, who carries it home on his shoulders, and who is even prepared to give his life for it.
2. That his love is heartfelt and sympathetic is shown by the fact that he had the utmost understanding for every form of physical and spiritual suffering he encountered. At one time he restored a child to his weeping mother, at another he healed a withered hand, or he drove out the devil or fed the crowds which had followed him so faithfully for three days. And when they brought him a woman who had been caught in adultery, who was laden with guilt, he looked beyond the filth and suffering of sin to the ground of her soul and discovered a spark of longing for purity and goodness – and did not condemn her. Our Lord went about doing good.
3. Yet his heroic love led even further: "He loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2, 20). "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends" (Jn. 15, 13). If we want to understand our Lord’s love to some extent, we must dwell on this point. (…) The workaday saint is moved by all these proofs of the love of the God Man, and never tires of repeating with the apostle Paul: "He loved me and gave himself for me".
(Study on Workaday Sanctity, 1937 – From: “Christ my Light”)
In covenant unity, I invite you to continue to pray with each other and for each other, and in particular for those in our Schoenstatt Family who are struggling with health or other issues, or are mourning the loss of a loved one.
Wishing you all many blessings and graces from the shrine for this covenant day.
Shirley Hall
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