Monthly Devotions

Here we are on the threshold of a new school year!  One of the beautiful things about life, in my opinion, is the regular cycle that unfolds over the course of a year.  We see it, for instance, in the academic year with the thrill of new backpacks and pencils and teachers and it progresses through the celebrations of Fall and into Christmas and then the doldrums of winter and on to the anticipation of Spring and the end of the school year and summer vacation.  We see this cycle in the natural world – in the trees going from full bloom to multiple hues to being brown and falling and then to bareness before starting the cycle up again in Spring with buds and blossoms.  We also see this cycle unfolding in the Church’s liturgical year – again and again we pass through the cycle – Advent and then Christmas, Lent and Easter and Pentecost, the great feasts of the saints and of the Blessed Virgin Mary and, of course, of the Lord Himself.  Each year, in passing through these various cycles hopefully we are going deeper and deeper into them.  The Church’s liturgical year is marked by the great feasts and seasons, but traditionally the Church has also marked the passage of time and its cycles with monthly devotions – a person or a mystery that holds our attention for that month, allowing us to go more deeply into the mystery of what we are pondering and praying about.  The monthly devotional cycle of the Church is as follows:

January – The Holy Name of Jesus
February – The Holy Family
March – St. Joseph
April – The Holy Spirit
May – The Blessed Virgin Mary
June – The Sacred Heart of Jesus
July – The Precious Blood
August – The Immaculate Heart of Mary
September – Our Lady of Sorrows
October – The Queen of the Holy Rosary
November – The Souls in Purgatory
December – The Immaculate Conception

As you know each year I try to write a series of bulletin articles focusing in on topic – in the past I have covered the Mass, the Nicene Creed, the Life and Teaching of St. Paul, the Sacraments.  I’d like, this year, to put together a series of articles focusing in on these monthly devotions.  So, each month there will be an article discussing the monthly devotion and then a couple of other articles which contain prayers and devotions that we can pray during the course of the month.  I would encourage you to clip out the prayers and put them near you and use them in your daily prayer each month and by praying the monthly devotion and meditating on it, hopefully it will be a vehicle to draw us more closely to Christ and be assured that I will be praying them as well and so, together as a parish, we can keep these monthly devotions!