In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence.

I beg your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My immaculate mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Mark the Evangelist.

He is arguably the author of the oldest gospel,

that of St. Mark, even though it comes in the order in which it appears in the Bible after Matthew.

Who is Mark?

Mark is a loyal disciple of the Lord, who then became disciple of St. Peter.

Tradition has it that he wrote the gospel of St. Peter, that he listened to St. Peter preach, and that then the early Christian

community asked him to put in writing what he knew of the preaching of St. Peter, in essence.

It is the shortest of all the Gospels written in very simple language that allows everyone to have access to the mysteries of faith that our Lord transmitted through the Apostle Peter.

Who is Mark? Did he know our Lord himself personally?

Well, we don't know exactly, but tradition has it that in fact his family owned the

Senegal, where our Lord had the Last Su and where the apostles gathered together with Mary and the women on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came down upon all of them.

Mark, in fact, seems to be the only one who writes or records how a young man at the Garden of

Gitsmeny was taken by the guards that came to arrest Jesus, and since he had a

linen cloth wrapped around his naked body when they seized him, he somehow fooled them,

and leaving the linen cloth behind, he fled away from them

naked. People think that this is St. Mark inserting himself in his own gospel. Maybe it's a

cameo appearance like Alfred Hitchcock, who knows.

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