Happy Feast today on the feast of Mary Help of Christians! Our thoughts are with the shrine of Don Bosco, Matunga, Bombay where I schooled as a child from the 7th to 10th standard.
The devotion to Mother Mary was intense and prayerful even in those days. Mother Mary has never let down those who have faith in her. There was a family which was going through trying times. The father suddenly fell prey to a stroke and was paralysed -- and consequently made jobless. His family of three children pulled on with whatever resources they had until the mother was forced to break the last Fixed Deposit (FD) to feed the family. As she did so she began the novena to Mary Help of Christians. On her feast day an ad appeared in the papers from the same company from where her husband was retrenched for a vacancy for two handicapped persons. Praise the Lord! Her husband applied and was chosen.
Today we plan to go to the shrine of Don Bosco, Panjim, Goa for the 6 p.m. Mass to commemorate the feast of Mary Help of Christians. Sadly in Goa there is no celebration of the feast that I know of.
Mass at Don Bosco's was sublime. We really felt we attended a feast day Mass. The choir was mellifluous and the procession after the Mass made it all stand out. The readings were specially chosen as it were for the occasion. The reading was the one where Mary changes the water into wine. Indeed she does that in our own lives as well. I felt a surge of happiness when my first view of the church was the overhead screen which showed the same glorious picture of the blue and red Mary Help of Christians which is there at the shrine of Don Bosco, Matunga and on this blogpost.
I would like to share two things which happened that day, with the intercession of Our Lady. I had wanted to return my overdue library books the same day before going for Mass. Being a Saturday the issue section, I was told when we arrived, closed at 5.15 p.m. It was now 5.45 p.m. Confident that my books would be taken come what may, I ventured to the well of the section where the last issuing clerk was closing up. When I told him were had travelled from Vasco, he asked me to leave the books at the counter and he would do the needful.
Throughout that day I had been trying to get in touch with George, a friend of mine, who was to be passing through Goa the next day morning enroute to Kerala. With no advice about his coach number I was thinking it would be futile to travel all the way to Margao to search for him on the long platform. After the elevation something made me check my mobile to see if dad had called and if all was well with him at home. There was no message from dad but at there was one from George. It read, 'My phone network was down. Our coach is A1, seat nos 31-34. Train is running late.'
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Pix source: dbmshrine(dot)org
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