OMPH celebration

Our Mother of Perpetual Help: a gift to contemplate

May 2015

By Father Serafino Fiore, C.Ss.R.

God speaks in every age and in many ways, first of all through the person and the Gospel of Jesus Christ (cf. Hebrews 1: 1-2). God also speaks through the events of nature and the daily news, and even when we seek and reach out blindly for Him and perhaps find Him, though he is not far from anyone of us (Acts 17:27).

God also speaks to us Redemptorists through the 150 years (1866-2016) since the day Pope Pius IX entrusted to us the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which we are getting ready to celebrate. And we want to live it as an intense moment for our spirit.

As missionaries, we are led by instinct to ask how we have we responded to the mandate of the pope: “Make her known throughout the world.” What further initiatives should we undertake? What instruments should we use?

The first instrument is me. I will only make known to the world something that has first become important to me. Christ is the motive and the source of my missionary dynamism. It is passion for Christ that the icon wants to inflame in my life.

It is not necessary to start with grand ideas. It is enough to take some time, to pause before the icon, to contemplate and open ourselves to a truth that goes beyond us.

There is no lack of difficulties. Our engine is always running. There is so much to do. And when we decide to stop, fatigue, sleep, or the thousands of images by which we are constantly besieged overcome us.

“Modern man has lost the virtue of contemplation. We are skilled at reading, thinking, speaking; but we cannot do it without clinging to images that are highly sensible [i.e., capable of being perceived by the senses; material],” said Pope Paul VI. And this was before the Internet and satellite dishes.

The icon is also a gift for this. It is an image, but it evokes something else. It catches the eye but wants to touch the heart. Therefore we must give it time and implore, before all else, the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Ideally, the icon is part of an iconostasis: the wall of images that separates the people of God from the presbytery. Actually, it unites more than separates. While the people accompany with prayer and songs the gestures of the celebrant at the altar, the iconostasis shows the faces of Christ, of the Virgin, and of the saints, to blend together in mystery what the mind’s eye sees as separated.

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