Hail Holy Queen - Salve Regina

The prayer Hail Holy Queen which we pray after the Rosary is a most ancient prayer and beautiful. We declare that Mary the Mother of Jesus is "Holy" is "Queen" "Mother of all "Mercy" (Jesus).
She is a "hope". We cry to Mary because before Mary's "Fiat" and the beginning of the work of our Redemption we were indeed "poor banished children of "Eve" (hawah-mother of all living) and in some ways we still are because we can no longer meet our creator face to face as "Eve" did in the garden. Today we meet our God and creator only with the eyes of faith. The Sin of Origins (of our first parents) deprived for us the experience of visual and "face to face" intimacy (He walked with Adam in the cool of the garden) with Him. As we live on this earth (Garden of Eden?) and it is His joy and ours that we do so, we are deprived of the same intimacy of our "Father" as you and I have the visible and tangible intimacy with our own fathers. As you and I have an intimacy with your/my children.
We sigh and are sad because of this barrier that prohibits us from embracing our Heavenly Father as we embrace our own living children.
"This Valley of Tears" is the earth and our life as we live them.
My own life is strewn with tears and  sorrow and loss and often feel like they could fill a valley with my tears (poetically). So collectively the tears of the human beings in our daily lives fill a whole valley and form an river and fill and top up the ocean.
"Turn then most gracious advocate thine eyes of Mercy towards us" A new title for Our Blessed Mother. Remember Jesus on the Cross gave her to us as "our Mother" so we can turn to "our Mother" as we turn to our human mother for advocacy, for comfort, support, for intimate needs, so we turn to our heavenly mother for comfort for our soul’s needs, to help us to carry that heavy cross  like my own deeply regretted two decisions which changed the trajectory of my life.
"And after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb....Jesus"
And in this exile/banishment from the embrace and vision of my own true Father, we ask, "Mum, when we come to the end of this journey, would you take me by the hand and introduce me to your Son who gave you to me and who bought for me this new and intimate relationship with Our Father/my Father?
I believe wholly completely and totally that I receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of my Lord Jesus when I receive the Eucharist and as I said in the past if I close my eyes I can see the beauty of the light of my Lord Jesus of the Transfiguration. But it is only through the imagination and not the visual.
We are meant to be perfect as Our heavenly Father is perfect, but the reality is that we are not and whilst we remain on this earth we can and do fail the ideal. None of us is sinless. We all sin and fall far short of the glory of God. However, for this and for the reason of His great love for us, He has left for us the remedy for this  our inclination towards failing the ideal.
Yes Jesus has conquered the Sin of World, but this knowledge has to be taken on board, acquired and made one's own and again the reality is that we are human beings who are frail and like St Paul says, I want to do good things but I fail.
The prayer "Hail Holy Queen" has written within it a most marvellous catechesis and if it could be "delivered" it would open the eyes of the soul. Within this catechesis, is the story of God, creation, sin, redemption and return to Our Father.
To the best of our knowledge we seek Christ in His integrity, unbroken just as His mother and Father gave Him to us. This is what the journey is all about. Finding the Total and Whole and Complete Christ in His divine essence.
That we  should love our enemy is a given. That we get hurt with our enemy's arrows, is also a given and in our labour to forgive is when we grow deeper in the dimension of the Cross and in the finding Christ in His integrity. And Our Holy Queen leads us in that.

Christmas Wishes

Dear friends I wish for you a happy and Holy Christmas and a New Year filled with graces.
Thank you for your love and support of me personally, and the work that I do.
God Bless
Anne

Woman Dies following Abortion.

A report in the Age (one of our daily newspapers) yesterday, December 21, reported that the woman who had had a late term  abortion earlier this year had died on Sunday 18th December. It is alleged that the abortionist "Dr Schulberg" performed the late term abortion whilst she was very ill and the abortion left her fighting for life as she was rushed to one of our hospitals Box Hill Hospital. This fight ended with her death.
This abortion was performed at the abortion clinic generally known for late term abortions formerly known as the Croydon Day Clinic, but now operated by the Marie Stopes International group and Dr Schulberg, an abortionist there, is being investigated by the Medical Practitioners Board. He has been previously been found guilty of professional misconduct, and also guilty of inapropriately prescribing painkillers.  This is also the facility where the anaethestist Dr James Peters is alleged to have infected over 50 women with Hepatitis C during 2008-9.
I wonder if the sisterhood and those who called for liberal abortion laws will lose any sleep over this. I wonder if those parliamentarians and feminists who pushed through laws for abortion to full term can sleep well.  This comes several weeks after the "accidental?" abortion of twin boys at 32 weeks because one of the babies had congenital heart disease.  I wonder if anyone at the Marie Stopes International will lose sleep over the death of this woman and her child before her.
We have opened up the Pandora's Box, or even the gates of hell,  and they will refuse to be shut. 
This will not be the only death because of abortion they will continue. And how interesting that it did not make blaring headlines. I looked through another of our "daily" papers today The Herald Sun, and guess what nothing.  Not important topic. Just a million adds for Christmas shopping and the Cricket team nominations....Wow, Australians have priorties right havent we?
And of course we have those who say that abortion does no harm either physically, mentally or emotionally.  I wonder how the family whose wife and mother died will feel?
Like the politicians we have, who are self serving, we get what we deserve, and the worst thing that God can do is to leave us to our own devices and ways,  then we know that we are in trouble.
I feel drained, sad, almost helpless that with all the information available, still women will resort to abortion to "fix" what appears to be a problem, a child, where indeed it would have been the remedy and the blessing.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/woman-dies-after-abortion-clinic-visit-20111220-1p414.html

Gethsemane

For a whole week I visited a  very distant inlaw relative in hospital. She had had a massive heart attack and two strokes and was not expected to survive.  Very elderly, a concentration camp survivor who had no children and whose spouse had predeceased her and very few friends left.


As I called in after work day in and day out, I couldn't move or shake my thoughts away from Gethsemane. I kept thinking about Gethsemane, as I always do when someone is in the last moments/hours. I don't know why but I do.  Hooked up to tubes and machines and in a strong delirium and thrashing about it was hard to watch.


I could hear her recollections of events of WWII and abuse and her tormenting noises. She called her "daughter" though none existed. (or maybe she did) and calling her husband. And of course she didn't recognise me or any of the few who called to see her.  And I reflected on her words during the delirium, of things we knew nothing about. Of her reliving incidents. And all I could do was sit and wait and hold her hand (she held so tight) sometimes late into the night and talking with her and telling her "stuff" and still I kept thinking about Gethsemane.  The waiting and the watching.  I am not sad that she has gone because she had wanted to go to her husband. But still the waiting..


Whenever we read the story of Gethsemane we hear Jesus ask Peter, James and John to wait and watch with Him (Mt 26:38) but they don't.  They drift into a doze under some heavy emotional weight.
Jesus, I presume, had hoped that they might have stayed with him a while and accompanied him, and supported him  in that hour of his "aloneness" but somehow they couldn't.  There was a sense of heaviness which stopped this from happening.  They couldn't be present to Him and for Him because they had a sense of dread of the unspeakable.  Something which they could not name but would surely happen.  They couldn't stay awake and pray because they might have been "prayed out" and when someone is prayed out someone else has to take over probably like the Cyrene,  I think Sula felt like this, so I prayed for her daily as I sat by her bedside.
Ostensibly it appears that the apostles let Jesus down and abandoned Him and perhaps it could be said that they did, but when we stand and hold the hand of a dying person, whenever we wait an hour and another hour with someone to turn the corner or to go. Whenever, we spend hours sponging the dry lips and dry tongue of someone who can't ,then we wait awhile, as asked.  Whenever we close the eyes and catch the last gasp of breath of a human being who is leaving for home, then we fulfill the request of Jesus to wait awhile.
The friends of Jesus can be harshly judged for "sleeping" and yet we know how hard it is to wait and wait especially when we reach a place where we feel we cannot go further, and then we have to allow others to carry us while we sleep.


I suspect that the friends of Jesus reached a stage where they couldn't pray or help anymore.  They just drifted.  It has been said that the wine helped the sleeping. Perhaps.  It helped to dull the aching pain of something different with that night. Ominous.   The beginning of the separation from their loved one ...Jesus.
Whenever, we can wait an hour praying, sighing, or holding a frail hand or sponge a brow or lips, then we are doing this for Jesus, We stand in for Peter, James and John, who couldn't at that moment stand a while with Him  "whatever you do for the least of my friends you do for me" (Mt 25:31-46).


As I reflected on the life of Shula and the sufferings she endured it was a quiet privilege to "watch and wait" and hold her hand and give her drink,  and  then she left quietly not to disturb...when I was asleep.