C’est le mois de MARS! Courage nous quittons l’obscurité! Tous les espoirs sont permis car on voit poindre le soleil qui se fait de plus en plus fort à l’horizon. Voilà un petit gain d’espérance avant que jaillisse partout la vie… dans la nature!… et surtout dans nos cœurs!… Pâques! La Résurrection!
Impact J… it's not just about the impact of Joseph on the world, it’s about the impact of Joseph in my personal life. Praying for the leaders of the world, it means praying for my government, sure. But it also means praying for my boss, my colleagues, my friends, myself, anybody who is a leader, anyone who has a responsibility.
We must pray a lot. We are a time where we need to plead for World Peace. Let us ask Jesus, Mary and Joseph to assist us. I am convinced that only prayer can change things. May people’s hearts burn with the fire of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of Mary and may Joseph help us remain on the right path.
The new prayer to Saint Joseph proposed by Impact J, to guide the world leaders, at different levels of responsibilities and in different life situations, is an encouraging experience! It is simple and more directed towards collective accountability in regards to the governance of our world, both for the leaders as for those who are being led.
When I was a teacher, I took my students in small groups of 10-15 on regular trips to Saint Joseph’s Oratory. It was time and energy consuming and I wondered if this was all worth it…did they come just to get a day off from school or did they really benefit from this visit? So I asked Saint Joseph to give me sign that it was important to pursue this activity. On my next visit, as was my habit, I invited my students to make a personal request to Saint Joseph…
During the ice storm in Canada, in the year of 1998, my parents who were without electricity lit some candles on the kitchen table. Not long after that, the whole kitchen was warm. What an experience! One light warms the heart, ten lights warm a room, so what can we say of a hundred? Every person is a light, a source of warmth that motivates me to keep praying to saint Joseph with perseverance.
My father was very thin when he was born and would not eat. People said that he had to be laid on a pillow so “he wouldn’t beak”. My grandmother Blanche had to feed him with a dropper. Obviously, he was not going to live very long.
My great grandmother, who was living in the house at the time, decided that she would go see Brother André with my grandmother to ask that my father be healed. These two courageous women climbed the steps of the Oratory on their knees, taking turns in carrying the baby…
The event happened in favor of Saint Teresa of Avila and her nuns who were travelling to found, once again, a monastery of Carmelite nuns. Marcelle Auclair tells us the story in “Saint Teresa of Avila”.
The seven convents of Carmelite nuns previously founded by Teresa of Jesus were “in her neighbourhood”, twenty or thirty miles around Avila: in this cold month of February 1575, she ventured towards Beas, at the borders of Castile and Andalusia, in the province of Jaen. Frightened by the perspective of a long and difficult journey through the mountains, she was nonetheless convinced by the obstinate devotion of the donors, the two noble Godinez sisters, and by the lure of a climate particularly sweet and delicious.
For days the rickety jolting carts jerked their way across the sierra. There was no end to the zigzags, steep ascents and abrupt falls. The mules went more and more slowly, less and less surely, and the drivers themselves seemed to have no lungs left as they shouted their Ar-e-e-e-e! to spur on their beasts.
