Painted by Adonai
Camilleri Cauchi in 2019, it was commissioned by Fr. Donald Calloway, MIC for
his book "Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father".
Since this is one of the rare images where we know the artist, please support
his work.
You can also find him on Facebook... apparently he lives in Malta. I'm in the
process of trying to reach out to him for his blessing on distributing his
work freely to any who want it and encouraging people like you to support his
work.
What really jumps out at me in this image is the joyous expressions being exchanged by Our Lady and her earthly spouse.
It is the joy of collaborative effort in defeating evil.
It is the joy of chaste spousal love.
It is the joy of youth.
It is the joy of channeling the love of God.
It is the joy of bringing new life into the world.
It is the joy of a newborn baby’s cry.
It is It is the joy of working together in a crazy covert operation to bring God into the world in a way almost inconceivable.
This last bit of joy calls to mind lines from a favorite song about the birth of Jesus by Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn:
Like a stone on the surface of a still riverDriving the ripples on foreverRedemption rips through the surface of timeIn the cry of a tiny babe
Ultimately for me though, what shines through the most is spousal love. I’ve been assembling snippets of beautiful spousal prayers and praying them for years for my beloved. They developed into the prayer you see opposite the image. I’d always wondered what image could go with such a prayer and when I saw this one, I knew I’d found the right one.
I’m told that we are our spouse’s most powerful intercessors. There are special graces flowing from spousal prayer that cannot be measured or quantified. I know my wife’s prayers for me led me to the rooms where I first found sobriety and later to the Calix Society where my sobriety deepened and continues to flourish.
Of course the prayer on the card is just a suggestion. As it is I removed the feminine pronouns and my wife’s name from the prayer you see here. You may already have your own prayer or prayers that you pray for your beloved. Perhaps you don’t have an earthly spouse or perhaps the image suggests something completely different than spousal love to you. Just remember that in a more real than real sense that we as the Church both corporately and as individuals are called the bride of Christ... so each of us baptized are already married to God in a mysterious way. So there is always a sense in which spousal love can be practiced by every Christian.
Truly though, any prayer that comes to mind because of the image is appropriate for that is the whole point of Visio Divina in the first place. Look at an image and pray the prayers that bubble up.
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