Immacul'ee Ilibagiza - Rwanda Genocide Survivor

Picture courtesy of Left to Tell




I must start off by apologizing for the photos. We were sitting pretty close but I felt uncomfortable taking pictures in a Church.

My family and I and what appeared to be all of Oahu, just kidding... but it was standing room only, went to see and hear Immacule'e Ilibagiza last evening.

For those of you not familiar with this amazingly spiritual lady, she was the only member of her family who survived the horror of the Rwanda genocide, in 1994.

She is a beautiful and graceful woman. She spoke in a soft voice and many times she made us laugh. This morning as I reflected on her talk last night, I was impressed so deeply that someone who had lived through a nightmare beyond our normal comprehension, could still be funny and love life.

She and her family were Catholics and members of the minority Tsutsi tribe in Rwanda. Their nightmare began when the President of Rwanda died. Her parents told her that she must go into hiding. They sent her to the home of a neighboring Protestant pastor and a member of the rival Hutu tribe. Before she left her parents, her father gave her a Rosary.

The pastor told her that he must hide her or she would be killed. In that short time, she and another seven women were hid in a bathroom that was 3' x 4'. They were instructed not to flush the toilet or talk.

For the first two days, they weren't even given food to eat because of fear that they would be found. Finally, the pastor was safely able to bring them something to eat.

During this ordeal where she and the others learned that people were being killed, she felt anger and hatred. She prayed the Rosary but at the parts of the Our Father where she had to pray "and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive...." she just skipped over that part. She could not forgive the killers for what they had done.

There were a few times when the killers searched the home of the pastor. Immacul'ee would pray to God thusly "If You are real, don't let them find us". God answered her prayers because she heard the killers tell the pastor..."You know we trust you. There is no way you can hide those cockroaches...enemies of the country". They were in fact standing right outside the bathroom door.

During this time she continued to feel fear and anger. She felt that their ordeal must be worse than Purgatory because at least in Purgatory, we have no body to feel pain.

She continued to pray the Rosary but now she prayed to stop being angry and feeling hate. During her days in hiding she would pray about 7 Rosaries and 14 Chaplets of the Divine Mercy daily.

So she continued her interior struggle between love and hate, realizing that both emotions could not live together and still have God on her side. She finally asked God to help her forgive.

Immacul'ee told us that it was only during this time in hiding that she finally could meditate deeply on what sufferings Christ had endured for love of us and how His mother had suffered.

She spoke about the dangerous gift God gave us, that of Free Will. She felt that God must be so sad to see how His gift was misused.

By the time she and the others were safe enough to leave the bathroom, three months had past. Immacul'ee said she weighed only 65 lbs.

She found out that all of her family members had been killed. All together over a million people were killed during a three month reign of terror.

She specifically warned us in the audience that this could happen anywhere and at anytime if we didn't love God and our neighbor. It seems that the people in Rwanda did not like their president at the time before the genocide. They wished that he would die. And, guess what? He did die and that country's nightmare began. She told us not to hate our president but to pray for him....to pray for our country's leaders. Very poignant especially when think about how many in our own country and in the world feel about our current president.

There is so much more I could share but I would recommend you read more about her yourself in her book Left to Tell. Her message was that of love and forgiveness and above all trust in God. She told us that if we lost everything like she did but had the Holy Bible and our Rosary...and of course God, we didn't need anything else. I noticed that the audience was mixed by that I mean, not all Catholics. Not once did she mention she was Catholic but she was a one-woman evangelist for the Catholic Church by her simple and loving words.

The Magnificat

Prayers for the Family

Picture courtesy of this SITE

PRAYER FOR A FAMILY

Jesus, our most loving Redeemer,
You came to enlighten the world
with Your teaching and example.
You willed to spend the greater part of Your life
in humble obedience to Mary and Joseph
in the poor home of Nazareth.
In this way You sanctified that family
which was to be an example for all Christian families.

Graciously accept our family
which we dedicate and consecrate to You this day.
Be pleased to protect, guard, and keep it
in holy fear, in peace,
and in the harmony of Christian charity.
By conforming ourselves to the divine model
of Your family,
may we all attain to eternal happiness

ANOTHER PRAYER FOR A FAMILY

God of goodness and mercy,
to Your fatherly protection we recommend our family,
our household, and all that belongs to us.
Fill our home with Your blessings
as You filled the holy house of Nazareth
with Your presence.
Keep us from sin.
Help each one of us to obey Your holy laws,
to love you sincerely, and to imitate Your example,
the example of Mary, Your mother and ours,
and the example of Your holy guardian, St. Joseph.

Lord, preserve us and our home
from all evils and misfortunes.
May we ever be resigned to Your divine will
even in the crosses and sorrows
which You allow to come to us.
Finally, give all of us the grace
to live in harmony and love toward our neighbor.
Grant that each of us may deserve by a holy life
the comfort of your Sacraments at the hour of death.

Bless this house,
God the Father, who created us,
God the Son, who suffered for us on the Cross,
and God the Holy Spirit, who sanctified us at Baptism.
May the one God in three divine Persons
preserve our bodies,
purify our minds,
direct our hearts,
and bring us all to everlasting life.

New Saint Joseph People's Prayer Book, Catholic Book Publishing Co. New York

Fighting the Devil's Attack on the Family

The family is under constant attack. It seems like the devil is working overtime to destroy what God has created.

On the Woodland Word,Tracy's blog, she shares an insightful article by Father Roger Landry. I would like to share some excerpts with you:

All of existence is meant to be familial. Pope John Paul II used to call the Blessed Trinity a family, because it is a structured communion of persons in love, with a Father, a Son and the love between them. The human person was made in the image and likeness of God, "male and female He made them" (Gn 1:27-28), and hence the image of God is familial: a husband and a wife can love each so much that, like the Trinity, their love can generate a third person. They can literally "make love" and then name, raise and live in joyful communion with the love they've made.

But man, woman and children didn't live up to their being in the image of God. Right from the beginning, sin invaded the family. It began with Adam and Eve and the first sin. It quickly passed to their children. Cain killed his brother Abel. There was envy between Abraham's sons Isaac and Ishmael, enmity between Isaac's sons Jacob and Esau, envy between Jacob's 12 sons, ten of whom ganged up to try to kill their brother Joseph. There was deadly envy in David's family. The list goes on and on. Simply put, the family had become a mess. As the human family "increased and multiplied," so did sin. Jesus was born of a family to come to redeem the family, which has such a crucial role in the world God created.

Isn't it interesting that this week's Mass readings have been Genesis...about God's creation, the Fall of Man. Even in the very beginning the devil started causing trouble in the family.

Each family needs to see whether they're centering their lives on Christ. So many families today are centered on the television, or on sports, or lessons of one sort or another, or on work schedules. But Christ needs to be the center of a family's activities. It's not enough for the members of the family to pray individually. They need to pray together...

The members of a family need to do the will of God and encourage each other to do the will of God. Many families do this. They inspire each other to become holy and encourage each other to pray. Some of the most beautiful conversions I've seen in the priesthood have occurred during marriage preparation, when the faith of the future bride or groom is so contagious that it inspires the other to start to take the faith much more seriously. The members of the family, by what they say, do and fail to do, will either help the others become holy or help them to sin on the basis of whether they try to do the will of God and encourage the others to do the same.

Lastly, the family is always under threat. At the beginning of time, with Adam and Eve, the devil attacked the family, separated husband from wife through sin, and got brother to kill brother. When Jesus came to redeem the family, the attacks didn't stop. The devil filled Herod's heart and the maniacal monarch sent his henchmen to try to kill the Christ child. But God acted. He sent His angel to wake Joseph up from his sleep and tell him to take Mary and Jesus and flee into Egypt. The devil continues to try to divide families through sin. We see it in countless broken families, the fifty percent divorce rate, in the unhappiness of many homes even when the family stays intact...

...When the Holy Family was under attack, God sent His messenger to St. Joseph to wake him up and warn him about the threat. Joseph immediately got up and acted to protect the Holy Family. God is sending you a message. Wake up! The family is under attack. He wants us to get up like St. Joseph and act. We ask Mary to intercede for us and our families, to help them become truly holy. We also ask St. Joseph to intercede so that we might be as courageous in defending the institution of the family as he was in protecting the Holy Family.

The Sacrament of Penance

Lenten Reading Resolution

One of the things I give up for Lent is reading for pleasure. That means, I stop reading novels and magazines and focus more on spiritual reading.

Right now, I have a box full of Catholic newspapers and magazines that my mom sent me a while back. I have not found time to read them. She send me Our Sunday Visitor, Crisis, Lay Witness, etc. Starting on Wednesday, I will make a conscious effort to read them all and then share them with others.

As for books, I am currently perusing our bookshelves to see what is appropriate for Lent and my initial choices are as follows:

1. Heart of Joy: The Transforming Power of Self-Giving by Mother Teresa.

Heart of Joy portrays the beauty and power of self-giving by introducing us to
the poor, not only in Calcutta but in our own homes and neighborhoods, and by
telling how God has given them to us as a means of knowing and loving him.

2. Interior Castles by St. Teresa de Avila

Interior Castle is one of the most celebrated books on mystical theology in
existence. It is the most sublime and mature of Teresa of Avila's works and
expresses the full flowering of her deep experience in guiding souls toward
spiritual perfection. In addition to its profound mystical content, it is also a
treasury of unforgettable maxims on such ascetic subjects as self-knowledge,
humility, detachment and suffering. But above all, this account of a soul's
progress in virtue and grace is the record of a life--the interior life of
Teresa of Avila, whose courageous soul, luminous mind, and endearingly human
temperament hold so deep an attraction for the modern mind.

3. Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life by Henri J. M. Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill and Douglas A. Morrison

In this provocative essay on that least understood virtue, compassion, the
authors challenge themselves and us with these questions: Where do we place
compassion in our lives? Is it enough to live a life in which we hurt one
another as little as possible? Is our guiding ideal a life of maximum pleasure
and minimum pain? Compassion answers no....

There is one book that I plan on buying tomorrow and that is 101 Inspirational Stories of Reconciliation by Sr. Patricia Proctor.

Catholics and Our Responsibility to Take Care of the Environment

There shouldn't be any debate at all on the Catholic Church's stand on the enviroment. After all, God created the world and all living things and we in turn should be the guardians of the planet God gave us to use.

However, you would have to be in deep denial to say that our planet is in fine shape. Look at the serious problem of misusing or wasting these gifts. By overdeveloping once untouched places e.g. Amazon Rain Forest, animals suffer because they are losing their homes. People suffer, especially the poorest and in the end, humanity as a whole will suffer.

It just about galls me to see overdevelopment everywhere. In the state where my family live, you hear about black bears being a problem. They come too close to humans. Well, what do people expect since the wooded area that was once their home, has been destroyed and new condos, townhomes or large single family homes built there instead. This problem is seen world-wide now.

We need to do something about our planet. First and foremost we should be taking care of our own little enviroment. We should not be wasting our precious resources like water, energy, etc.

It is going too far to scare everyone like Mr. Gore and some scientists are doing by pounding into our brains GLOBAL WARMING, GLOBAL WARMING. Not wasting things is a big step in taking care of our environment and you don't need anyone to tell you otherwise and simplifying our lives.

For more information on this topic:

Our Sunday Visitor: Unusual weather warms interest for Catholics in global climate change

Simple things one can do to make a difference:
Make an impact

Simple ways that you can help the environment by changing one or two everyday behaviors:

- Walk or bike to the store instead of taking the car, or combine trips so that you use the car less frequently.

- Turn down the thermostat in the winter, and turn it up in the summer.

- Replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

- Educate yourself about stewardship of the earth’s resources.

The following is from the Christophers: Taking Care of God's Good Earth:

What Can One Person Do?
1. Don’t over-consume. Repair. Reuse. Recycle.

2. Save energy. Replace burnt-out light bulbs with those most energy efficient.

3. Conserve water. Turn off the tap while brushing teeth or shaving; water the lawn after sunset.

4. Take public transportation, car pool, bike or walk to and from work.

5. Don’t litter anywhere: on a street or a beach, in a park or a theater.

6. Keep it down. Avoid noise pollution.

7. Vote: support public transportation, environmental issues, etc.

8. Encourage children to be good stewards through example and community cooperation.

Conversation With Christ

From the daily e-letter.

Conversation with Christ: Lord, I want to live my life for you. I don’t want to chase after the passing pleasures of this world. I want to set my heart and mind on fulfilling your will and accomplishing the plans you have set for me. Help me to know your will. Inflame my heart to love your will. Strengthen my will to carry it out as perfectly as you ask of me. Please grant me the graces that I will need to respond faithfully to your holy inspirations.

Resolution: I will look for something positive to say about my parish priest and share this with others.

Well, although I don't know our new parish priest very well, I was impressed by the fact that he genuflected before the Blessed Sacrament as he approached the Altar, during the Processional. By his example, people in their pews were made more aware of the Real Presence.

Happy St. Valentine's Day

Pray for Portugal Tag - Corrected Tag

Please feel free to put this tag on your blogs. More importantly, continue to pray for Portugal

I DIDN'T NOTICE UNTIL TONIGHT THAT THERE WAS A MISSPELLING. THIS IS THE CORRECTED TAG. SORRY ABOUT THAT.