On Offering Ourselves wholly to God [V]

On Offering Ourselves wholly to God [V]

I offer Thee also all the holy aspirations of devout persons; the
needs of my parents, friends, brothers, sisters, and all who are dear
to me; and the needs of all who have desired or asked me to pray and
offer the Eucharist for them and theirs, whether living or departed. I
pray that all these may enjoy the assistance of Thy grace, the aid of
Thy comfort, protection from dangers, and deliverance from pains to
come; and that, freed from all evils, they may offer glad praise and
thanks to Thee.
--Thomas à Kempis--Imitation of Christ Book 4 Ch.9

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October 9th - St. Sabinus
(Also known as St. Savin)

5th v.
This saint is venerated as the apostle of the Lavedan, that district
of the Pyrenees at one end of which is situated the town of Lourdes.
According to his legend he was born at Barcelona and brought up by his
widowed mother, who when he became a young man sent him to the care of
his uncle Eutilius at Poitiers. Being appointed tutor to his young
cousin, Savin (Sabinus) so impressed him by his religious example and
inspiring words that the youth secretly left home and went to the
great monastery at Ligugé. Eutilius and his wife besought Savin to use
his influence with their son to induce him to return home. But he
refused, quoting the words of our Lord that He must be loved even more
than father and mother, and furthermore announced his intention of
becoming a monk at Ligugé himself.

St. Savin eventually left there with the object of becoming a
solitary. He walked to Tarbes and from thence made his way to the
place in the Lavedan then called Palatium Aemilianum, where there was
a monastery. The abbot, Fronimius, showed him a place a little way off
in the mountains well suited to his design. Here St. Savin built
himself a cell, which he afterwards exchanged for a pit in the ground,
saying that everyone should expiate his sins in the way and the
measure that seems to himself called for. This in reply to Fronimius,
who on one of his frequent visits to the hermit expressed the opinion
that his austerities were becoming exaggerated. Savin preached to the
peasants of the neighbourhood by his mouth and by the example of his
kindly and penitential spirit, and many and remarkable was the
miracles with which they credited him. For example, a farmer having
roughly stopped him from crossing his land to reach a spring, he
struck water from the rocks with his staff; and one night, having no
dry tinder, he lit his candle by the flames from his own heart! He
wore only one garment, summer and winter, and that lasted him for
thirteen years.

St. Savin was forewarned of his death and sent a message to the
monastery, and he was surrounded by clergy, monks and devoted people
when his peaceful end came. His body was enshrined in the abbey
church, which was afterwards called St. Savin’s, and the name extended
to the adjacent village, Saint-Savin-de-Tarbes.

No reliance can be placed upon the short text of uncertain date
printed in the Acta Sanctorum, October, vol. iv (cf. Mabillon, Annales
Benedictini, vol. i, p.575); even the century in which the hermit
lived is a matter of pure conjecture the above time-heading follows A.
Poncelet. It is characteristic of the methods of a certain type of
hagiographer that out of these scanty materials a writer in the
so-called Petits Bollandistes has evolved a biography of seven closely
printed pages (over 4,500 words) in which he speaks with the same
detail and definiteness of statement as he might have used in
providing a summary of the career of Napoleon I.


Saint Quote:
No matter how good food is, if poison is mixed with it, it may cause
the death of him who eats it. So it is with conversation. A single bad
word, an evil action, an unbecoming joke, is often enough to harm one
or more young listeners, and may later cause them to lose God's grace.
--St. John Bosco

Bible Quote:
But by the grace of God, I am what I am. And his grace in me hath not
been void: but I have laboured more abundantly than all they. Yet not
I, but the grace of God with me:  For whether I or they, so we preach:
and so you have believed.  [1Co 15:10-11] DRB


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O Most Holy God

O most Holy God, I adore Thee, through the Adorable Sacrament of the Altar,
and I offer Thee, through the holy hands of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, all
the consecrated Hosts on our Altars as a sacrifice of expiation, reparation,
and atonement for all the sacrileges, profanations, impieties, blasphemies,
and crimes committed against Thee throughout the universe. - Amen.