Body of Christ

Happy Thursday everyone,

This has been an extremely long week for me, not sure about the rest of you. Hopefully you all have some relaxing weekend plans. Tharin and I actually get to stay home for most of the weekend, which rarely happens.

If you have any comments, please post them below, or personal message me on Facebook. Anyone that has any suggestions for topics, or perhaps would like to add to a future blog post themselves, feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you, and I am sure that people would like to hear from someone other than me once in a while!


Week Three: Unity

I went and read a lot about Mother Teresa before writing this, so prepare for a possible Mother Teresa explosion.

In the past I have been called a negative people watcher. It has been a struggle for me to see good or beautiful things in people instead of always pointing out the negative. That is the imperfect way that we tend to see the world. It is hard to understand authentic love that is separate from personal insecurities, pride, or our own limitations.

Deacon Ken mentioned that the saints embodied perfect love. He gave Mother Teresa as an example, and I am sure that we can all agree that she embodied a beautiful ability to love. It was her mission to do the smallest things with great love, to see Jesus in everyone around her.

One of my favourite of Mother Teresa's quotes is, "I am a little pencil in the hands of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world." She believed that no person should come to her without leaving happier.

The ability to love others authentically comes from a relationship with God - in which we trust Him fully, and unite ourselves to His Body. When we are united to Him, we are more capable of seeing people as He sees them, as unique members of His Body. Mother Teresa explained her charity as:

"Nothing but the overflow of our love for God. Therefore, the one who is most united to God loves others the most. To understand and practice this, we need to pray, for prayer unites us with God and overflows upon others." — Bl. Mother Teresa of Calcutta

I know I would love to be so overflowing with love of God that it flows over into my relationships with others.

Deacon Ken spoke of how the only way that we can be united to the Body of Christ, is to be united with the Eucharist. We actually pray for this every time we recite the Our Father, which Deacon Ken explained.

The second line he explained is, "give us this day our daily bread." In Greek, the word epiousion is used, and most people translate it to mean "daily", or "that which is upon us". However, another translation of the world epiousion is supernatural - the Eucharist.

The unity of the Eucharist.

 "Let us ask Our Lady to give us a heart so beautiful, so pure, so immaculate, so full of love and humilty, that we may be able to receive Jesus in the Bread of Life, love Him as she loved Him, and serve Him in the poorest of the poor." — Bl. Mother Teresa of Calcutta

As Deacon Ken had said earlier, the saints were not able to embody perfect love because they got it right on their own. It was because they allowed the love of God to work through them. They allowed themselves to be pencils as God wrote a love letter to the world through them.

Authentic love means learning to love the poorest of the poor. Seeing the beauty and good that God placed in every person He created. Authentic love sometimes means being charitable to those who are most annoying or painful to be around. Those that hurt us, those that we could choose not to forgive.

Authentic love means loving as Jesus teaches us to love. We can never make Him love us more. He loves us for who we are - before, after, and while we sin against Him. Authentic love is the Eucharist.

Peace,
Olivia Fischer



Reese, Father Benjamin. "Give Us This Day Our Daily "Supersubstantial" Bread." Adoremus Bulletin. 1 July 2007. Web. 26 Mar. 2015. <http://www.adoremus.org>.

Humble Beginnings

Happy Thursday everyone!

I hope you all have some exciting weekend plans - even if you have a pile of homework to do. Can you believe Easter is almost here? I can remember Lent taking forever as a kid. Especially because my mother always decided that we would give up dessert as a family. Six weeks without sweets? How will I survive?

Thank you so much for coming back and reading the blog this week. Please feel free to comment below, or send me a personal message on Facebook. I would love to share any stories that you feel called to contribute to the blog.

Week 2: Humility

Deacon Ken started his talk by comparing our faith life to a battlefield. We are constantly battling to advance, and finding that we are only retaking ground that we have conquered in the past.

I am sure for most of us this is a resounding truth. There have been so many times in my life where I have been in the habit of reading the Bible every day, praying the Rosary regularly. Where I have felt God present in my daily life. Only to find myself struggling to even find five seconds to pray before falling off to sleep - losing that battleground.

I think it is inevitable for us to have desert seasons in our faith where we do find it harder to search for relationship with God. However, during the question period, Deacon Ken answered a question about how we can reduce this amount of ground lost. He shared examples of periods in his life in which he struggled, and encourages us to persevere in disciplines, as he tries to do.

Some disciplines in the Catholic faith Deacon Ken gave as examples:

Stations of the Cross
Liturgy of the Hours
Daily prayers
Going to mass on weekdays
Praying the Rosary
Regular Confession

Maybe a discipline for you can be turning off the music for fifteen minutes on your way to work. Maybe it can be as simple as throwing on the Armour of God.

I have often been caught in a state of guilt over my inability to stay in relationship with God, over my weakness. Once in Confession I decided to confess this, and the priest indicated that guilt is one of the worst sins. It keeps us from God because we are actively holding ourselves back from His mercy. We are rejecting our humility.

As Deacon Ken explained: God wants us to succeed, and we need Him to be successful. This takes a huge amount of humility, knowing how much we need Him, how much we are incapable of doing on our own. We get in our own way by denying that we need help, that we need grace.

The great Saints were not perfect, they were not holy on their own. They let God in, and He did His work in them, He made them successful.

God has the ability to make us strong, all He asks is for us to trust Him with our weakness, to stop hiding behind guilt, or whatever else we use. He knows us, intimately - He formed every part of us and He is not ashamed of our weakness. So why are we?

You might start with humble beginnings, simply opening up to God with how little you feel. Praying for five minutes a day, but making it deliberate. Nothing you have to offer God is too small, too insignificant. He takes whatever we have to give, and He treasures it.

God bless, Olivia Fischer 

All Things

Hey everyone,

It was great to see so many of you at the last Zeteo event with Deacon Ken Noster. I know that I personally got so much out of his awesome talk on Authentic Spirituality, even if it looked like I was texting the whole time - just like me to forget a notebook.

Week 1: Trust

Since the day Jerome was born, he has always had a temper when it comes to food. So often he will be so upset about not having the food right then that he does not notice that I am holding the spoon waiting for him to just open his mouth.

You know, I think we are all a little bit like Jerome. 

How often do we doubt that God is leading us? That there is a purpose to everything that happens to us, even the things that cause us the most suffering. That, as Romans 8:26 tells us: All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.

Just as I would never withhold food from Jerome, because I am his mother and taking care of him is what I do, God does not withhold His grace, His strength, His purpose from us. He is holding the spoon, we just cannot see it sometimes.

Sometimes the greater plan is hard to understand. As Deacon Ken said, God is the Master Builder and we are just the workers. He sees the blueprints, He has the whole picture, we only see the bruised fingers from laying bricks. God is calling us to trust Him with the bigger picture, to trust His guidance.

This is not easy. It is hard to trust when we lose a job, are going through a breakup, struggling with school and feeling like we are completely out of our depth. It is so easy to doubt that there is any good in breaking a leg, or missing a concert because your vehicle breaks down. 

Deacon Ken spoke of how the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. Jesus would go away to pray and be in relationship with His Father. When He came back, He would be at such peace that absolutely nothing could be overwhelming. 

Teach us how to pray. So that we can also enter into relationship with the Father, so that we can learn to trust God in all things. For He has promised that all things work together for good.

If you have any comments, any discussion points, feel free to post below. I would love to see the conversation ball rolling.

God bless everyone,

Olivia Fischer