January 24, 2023, Class Update: Mary and Prayer

Greetings everyone!

In our most recent class, we started the Prayer for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which is annually from January 18-25.

I then shared some stories from my time at World Youth Day 2019, which was January 22-27 of that year in Panama City, Panama.

We then spent some time focusing on prayer, including through the perspective of Mary, based on pages 62-64 in the purple book Christ in the Liturgy.

Three types of prayer include vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplation.

We looked at two examples of prayers in the Bible: Hannah's song in 1 Samuel 2:1-10, and the Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55.

This image shows Mary in a posture of Mary at the Annunciation.  It is inside the Iglesia de San Francisco de Asís in Panama City, Panama.  All photos in this post, and on this website, are mine, unless otherwise stated.

When we pray, we put ourselves in the presence of God, and then we are called from prayer to action.

We each are called to do our part in building up the Body of Christ with our unique contributions.  St. Paul uses the metaphor of a body with its many parts in 1 Corinthians 12:12-30.  (That passage was the 2nd reading at the Closing Mass of World Youth Day 2019.)

We are off from class on January 31.  We're back on February 7, and our plan is to watch a documentary movie called Champions of Faith: Baseball Edition, which profiles the stories of people in the MLB and their faith lives.  It's a great film, and my students in the past have enjoyed it.

The only activity is to keep the Epiphany household blessing in place, and light the small tea candle if you haven't done so already.

You're welcome to wait until February 2, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, or Candlemas, when candles are customarily brought to church to be blessed.

For our closing prayer, I sang a Taize version of Simeon's Canticle in Luke 2:29-32, in Latin.

We remain connected as One Church, which is Catholic, or universal, throughout the whole world:
All my relations.

God's blessings,
Paul

Here are throngs of people gathered for the Closing Mass of World Youth Day 2019, in Panama City, on Sunday, January 27, 2019.

Image of Santa Maria de la Antigua, the Patroness Saint of Panama, inside the Tocumen International Airport chapel in Panama City


P.S. Here is the international version of the World Youth Day 2019 song that I played during class.

Here is a version in its original language of Spanish.

Here is a Wednesday Journal article about one of my former RE students, Joey, who donated his kidney.

Candlemas display at Church last year, on February 2, 2022

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