Happy Mother’s Day to Mothers Everywhere…..to mothers who give and give and then give some more. It is what we were made for, it is what we live for and it will be what we die for. Once a mother, always a mother. We watch them come into the world, we nurture them, try to solve their problems, and then watch them as they leave and embark on their own journeys.

We pray for them, we hurt for them, we rejoice for them. Whether they are near or far, our hearts are entwined with theirs. It is bittersweet…..more sweet than bitter!

“A mother will never desert her child. For she loves them with a love that is as strong and deep as life itself.”

Angelo and Mom (me)

My Mom

A Tribute to Mothers by Rev. John A. O’Brien, 1953

By universal proclamation our nation has added another memorial day to her calendar – Mother’s Day.

It is a day on which we pause to pay the tribute of our love and reverence to our mothers if living, to their memory if dead. It is eminently fitting that we should thus pause for a brief moment in the turmoil of life to give explicit expression to sentiments which have been latent in the hearts of each of us throughout all the days of the year.

It is good psychology to give fitting expression to such sentiments. For instead of allowing them to wane, we thereby strengthen and intensify them.

Such considerations are, moreover, wholesome and salutary for us because they render us more clearly conscious of the debt we owe our mothers.

“Motherhood,” says Frederick A. Stowe, “is the Gethsemane of nature.”

When the child is born the mother begins to die—die for the new life dearer than her own, die in service for another, die in dreams of peaceful valleys she shall not enter, die upon battlefields whose shouts of victory she shall not hear.

No sacrifice for the young is begrudged by the mother. Toward the sun of a new life, all nature turns. The springtide bursts with prodigality but there is not a drop of sap for the autumnal leaf. At the meridian declination begins. Reproduction is the inexorable ambition of the material world.

“In its spiritual aspects, motherhood is isolated because it is great. There is no speculation as to mother’s status. Conceded eminence is as lonely as some crag which lifts its head above the fugitive clouds and defies the furious winds below.

Youth loves to dwell in the warm valleys of patronage. It is eager for adventure and the conquests of blood. It rushes toward prospects and is ever willing to take a chance.

Reflection is the fruit of maturity. We do not begin to bear sense until passions are spent, and Time, which is a strict accountant, demands an audit.”

Various Kinds of Love

There are various kinds of love on this earth. There is the love of a friend for a friend, of a chum for his chum.

It is a beautiful sentiment and one which all the world admires. But friends fall out at times; the love cools and even turns to hatred.

There is the love of sweethearts. It is beautiful and tender and sweet. But sometimes the fancy changes, the romance fades, and sweethearts part.

There is the love of husband and wife, tender true and sanctified by divine grace. But the world witnesses at times the separation even of husband and wife, the pitiful tragedy of a broken home.

Then there is the love of a mother for her child. It is the climax of all human love – as strong as the great rugged Alpine Mountain peaks, as tender as the breath of an angel, as infinite as the measureless waters of the ocean, as changeless as the stars that shine eternally in the skies.

Friends may fall out, the romance of sweethearts may fade, husband and wife may separate, but a mother will never desert her boy. For she loves him with a love that is as strong and deep as life itself.

Aye, it seems to rise above all human love, and to burn with a spark that was caught from the flame of the love that is eternal and divine–the love of God for man.

I like to think that God has given us a foreshadowing and a foretaste of His own infinite love for human souls in the love He has planted in a mother’s breast.

From the Prayer Book Precious Blood and Mother:

There are soft words murmured by dear, dear lips,
Far richer than any other;
But the sweetest word that the ear hath heard
Is the blessed name of “Mother.”

O magical word! May it never die,
From the lips that love to speak it.
Nor melt away from the trusting heart,
That even would break to keep it.

Was there ever a name that lived like this?
Will there ever be such another?
The Angels have reared in Heaven a shrine
To the holy name of “Mother.”

Fortunate the child whose mother stands by its cradle like a Guardian Angel to inspire and lead it in the path of goodness! – Pope Pius XII

“Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!” 🙂

Richard “Dick” Sargent (1911-1979)

S

In With God in Russia, Ciszek reflects on his daily life as a prisoner, the labor he endured while working in the mines and on construction gangs, his unwavering faith in God, and his firm devotion to his vows and vocation. Enduring brutal conditions, Ciszek risked his life to offer spiritual guidance to fellow prisoners who could easily have exposed him for their own gains. He chronicles these experiences with grace, humility, and candor, from his secret work leading mass and hearing confessions within the prison grounds, to his participation in a major gulag uprising, to his own “resurrection”—his eventual release in a prisoner exchange in October 1963 which astonished all who had feared he was dead.

Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him…..

Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. Only through an utter reliance on God’s will did he manage to endure the extreme hardship. He tells of the courage he found in prayer–a courage that eased the loneliness, the pain, the frustration, the anguish, the fears, the despair. For, as Ciszek relates, the solace of spiritual contemplation gave him an inner serenity upon which he was able to draw amidst the “arrogance of evil” that surrounded him. Ciszek learns to accept the inhuman work in the infamous Siberian salt mines as a labor pleasing to God. And through that experience, he was able to turn the adverse forces of circumstance into a source of positive value and a means of drawing closer to the compassionate and never-forsaking Divine Spirit.

He Leadeth Me is a book to inspire all Christians to greater faith and trust in God–even in their darkest hour. As the author asks, “What can ultimately trouble the soul that accepts every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strives always to do his will?”

The Catholic Mother (Part One)

The Catholic Mother (Part Two)

Profession of Motherhood

All this makes the profession of motherhood a very high responsibility. Indeed, it is a profession more challenging than any other profession in the world.

There are professions which demand of those who practice them that they should be ready to face death in the discharge of their professional duties. Thus a soldier and a sailor have to be ready to give their lives upon demand. A doctor, a nurse, a priest, have each of them often to risk their strength, or even their lives, if the need of human service demands them.

But yet soldier, sailor, doctor, nurse, priest, may live to ripe old age without actually having to put their lives in jeopardy. They may never be in danger from the duties of their profession.

A mother is not like that. She has not only to be ready to endanger her life: she has actually to risk that danger. No mother but has actually faced that risk when she has acquitted herself again of motherhood.

Hence motherhood asks of every mother a character of heroism. Mothers are the most constantly heroic of mankind.

Mothers have therefore nearly always been found on the side of religion, for religion demands heroism of its followers.

Religion is not an opiate, for religion does not help people to forget, but to remember. It does not dull people. It does not say Take, but Give.

Religion asks everything of its believers, for religion is love, and love is the most demanding, the most costing, of all the passions of man. That is why Our Lord compressed the whole of religion into one commandment: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart. whole soul, whole strength.

Mothers perhaps more easily understand this than others (except young men, perhaps, who are learning it by falling in love).

Moreover, not only are mothers heroic because they are constantly being challenged to risk their lives, but also because more than any others they find their profession to be a whole-time job.

Mothers are never unemployed, or should not be, for their children are not merely to be born of them but tended by them until death parts them. Children take a deal of tending, children of all ages; and here, in the number of a mother’s children, even their father is to be reckoned.

To the mother, her very husband is always a child. He needs looking after as much as any of them, but he must not realize that she so judges of him. He is even more sensitive than the children are to the indignity of being publicly looked after by the mother. That only means that she must wait on him with the greater tact.

But her cares are only increased the more by this, and her employment is only the more continuous. She has to go on looking after them as long as any of them are still at home; that is what inevitably happens, for she is the home.

The family carries the nation, she carries the family. The whole of Christendom rests on the mother’s knee.

A New Age

Mothers are sometimes discouraged by their experiences to believe that these old ideals of motherhood are done with. In some moods they are led to think that the world has altered and that children no longer obey their parents nor will be governed by them as they once did.

It may be true. But if it is true, the cause for it is manifest. If a whole generation of youth no longer is governed by its parents, no longer reverences them, is utterly selfish towards them, the only people who can have brought this about are the parents themselves.

Individual cases indeed do not prove that individual parents have failed, for good parents can have ill-bred children and, contrariwise, careless parents may have children who worship them.

But it remains true that a whole generation can fail only because the generation immediately before it disregarded its duty.

The excuse is sometimes made that the young folk grew up in the war without a father to look after them. That alone would not have caused the trouble. The real cause was not that the fathers were not present, but that the mothers were absent. They went to work, or were touched by their excitement, and neglected their duty because, in that pitiful phrase, they wanted a good time.

Wise Self-Sacrifice

Perhaps, after all, the cause of that selfish generation of children was not exactly because mothers were negligent of their duty in that they did not look after their children. The selfishness of children may be due to another cause which, however, will not free the parents from blame.

It may be unselfishness that has been the mother’s undoing. To be self-sacrificing is admirable and motherly; but it has its disadvantages. It can be unwise.

Let us put it in this way. A mother will come to the priest and complain of her child to him. “Father, I have done everything for him, and now he turns round and is most selfish to me.”

Poor mother! All the more shall we pity her because his selfishness is in part her fault. Why did she do everything for her child? She should not have done everything. She should have let him do things for her himself.

When children are little, the mother does everything for them since they cannot do anything for themselves. But gradually she has to steel her heart against doing everything for them. They must be trained to do things for themselves. They must not be forever dependent on her. She has to train them to get on without her, to be independent of her, to live their own lives, to look after themselves.

Even that is not enough. They must not only be trained to do things for themselves, they must be trained to do things for her. And they will want to do many things for her; that is their nature, they will want to help.

There will be some things, of course, that very soon they will not want to do for her..dull, dreary things, fetching, cleaning, carrying. But these also they must be trained to do. The mother will often want to save time and trouble by doing them for herself, but if she does she will hurt her children’s character. She must train them young to work for others, to be unselfish, to give.

It is an almost inevitable effect of a large family that the children of themselves grow up generous and tolerant. This is thumped into them by the aid of many fists. But with a small family, it has all to de done by the mother and father. They have to do for their children what brothers and sisters would have done for them, for, whatever happens, the work needs to be done.

Mothers, then, must not allow their self-sacrificing nature, their heroism, to prevent them from demanding sacrifices in return from their children. Their needs and not her needs must be remembered. They need to be trained to give. Of their very childhood they are impulsive and generous, but this spontaneous character of theirs can be hurt. It can also be developed. Let mothers look into it.

That only is wise self-sacrifice when it encourages and demands sacrifice. A generous mother can reduce her children to selfishness, a mother who does everything for her child has actually taught that child to be selfish. She has no right to complain of his subsequent ingratitude. Her folly has ruined her child.

That is why it has happened that good mothers have ill-bred children; they were not really good mothers, for goodness includes prudence and wisdom.

Really good mothers are also wise mothers.

“The man takes you to the movie, to dinner, to a dance, to a party, or for an automobile drive, but you owe him no liberties for this. If you are an earnest Catholic girl, you will retain the grace of God and your self-respect, while enjoying the esteem of all good men. You will even make evil minds pause, dazzled by the purity in your eyes, the modesty of your actions, and the reserve in your words.” -Fr. Lovasik, Clean Love in Courtship https://amzn.to/2zcAFO7 (afflink)

Available here.

We live in an age characterized by agitation and lack of peace. This tendency manifests itself in our spiritual as well as our secular life. In our search for God and holiness, in our service to our neighbor, a kind of restlessness and anxiety take the place of the confidence and peace which ought to be ours. What must we do to overcome the moments of fear and distress which assail us? How can we learn to place all our confidence in God and abandon ourselves into his loving care? This is what is taught in this simple, yet profound little treatise on peace of head. Taking concrete examples from our everyday life, the author invites us to respond in a Gospel fashion to the upsetting situations we must all confront. Since peace of heart is a pure gift of God, it is something we should seek, pursue and ask him for without cease. This book is here to help us in that pursuit.

Reverend Irala here addresses ways to promote mental and emotional well-being to help increase one’s health, efficiency and happiness. He speaks on topics such as how to rest, think, use the will, control feelings, train the sexual instinct, be happy, and choose an ideal. Included are also many practical instructions on dealing with mental struggles of all kinds. This book is most useful in our present times of worldly confusion.

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support.

Fr. Bede Jarrett, O.P.

Nihil Obstat: PERCY JONES, Censor Diocesan

Imprimatur: D Mannix,

Archiepiscopus Melbournensis

June, 1958

The Catholic Mother, Part One

Motherhood and Children

In thinking of the children we think of their education, and so of their Catholic education, for Catholic education is not a right so much as a duty. It is a duty which lies on the father and mother as soon as the child is born.

The ancient Greeks insisted on the importance of surrounding babyhood with beautiful things; the psychologist of today entirely agrees with this. Without intermission the Church has taught the same thing; only with her it is holy things that the child should be surrounded by, namely, that particular beauty that is radiant with goodness from God. At least and always the Church insists that the child should have these.

Here Plato would also have approved, for he maintained that beautiful bodies were the lowest form of human beauties. Plato would have approved of beautiful holiness as the best surrounding for a child, that as early and constantly as possible it should be surrounded by whatever true idea, or true representation, of goodness the parents could collect round their child.

Thus the making of the sign of the Cross on itself, the joining of its hands together in prayer, a statue of the Child Jesus, a crucifix, statues of the Mother and Child, of St. Joseph, and of the Angel Guardian, should be familiar objects to a child, so that it grows up in an atmosphere of supernatural life. All this will depend largely on the mother’s sense of her duty to the child’s education and development.

Naturally, the physical well-being of her children must also be present to the mother’s mind; and here, in the earlier stages of its growth, she will have need to consult a doctor and a nurse. Let them, if possible, be Catholic doctors and nurses.

There are good doctors and nurses other than Catholic ones, certainly; but these, if they be properly instructed Catholics, will help a mother more faithfully than the others because she will have no misgiving or anxiety about their advice. She will be able to trust absolutely what they say.

But though the little body must be cared for, yet it must not be over-indulged. It must be kept clean. It is the temple of God.

Again, the right sort of food, for it is a matter about which advice should be asked from experts in motherhood, mothers who know.

Also the character of the child will need training as far as its frail condition will allow. It should not be allowed to grow up any way. Neither should it be nagged at. What is wanted is not to have to say, ‘you must not fight or lie or be selfish or disobedient, but to encourage children not to want to fight or lie or be selfish or disobey.

It is not actions, but character at the back of actions, that has to be laid hold of. Now character can only be formed by character on character. You can only train children properly by making them wish to form themselves on the model of another character. That is why it is a mother’s business to teach her child the beauty of the character of Christ. And she will teach it to her child successfully only in proportion to the way she herself perceives it.

Only because the mother loves the character of Our Lord is she likely to be able to show its beauty and greatness to her child, and convince it that He was great, is great. That is only another proof of the responsibility of motherhood: she and her child united for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer in the things of the spirit.

Lastly, there is the opening mind of the child to be taught and trained.

Education and the State

Actually the State now imposes compulsory education. (In Australia, all children must attend school from the ages of six to fourteen years, either at public schools, conducted by the State, or at private registered schools, such as are conducted by the Catholic Church.)

It may be that we would prefer education to be optional as long as every parent had the opportunity to send his children to a school, but the conditions actually obtaining make education compulsory. No doubt there is some loss in this.

It is better, both for parents and children, when the mother does some of the teaching herself. She would remember her schooling better herself if she had to teach it. Moreover, it keeps mother and child closer together all their lives long when the child’s memories are thus rooted in her home.

It is right also to remember that the authority which the teachers have over the children has been given them by the parents. The teachers have their authority because they stand in the place of the parents, and not from their relation to the State.

Their power is given them by the parents of the children, and these parents, even when giving them power, never abdicate their own powers. They have always to keep an eye on the education of their children.

Normally they can be sure that in the hands of the teachers, the children will be properly looked after. But parents should get to know the teachers, and be interested in the school, and try to see how they can help forward the education of their children. There should be co-operation between parents and teachers.

The teachers need this co-operation; sometimes they complain that the parents do not help them, that the parents undo their work, undo what the school has done for the children.

Parents, too, sometimes think that the school undoes what the home has done for the children. The best remedy and preventive is cooperation between parents and teachers, and this is the best thing for the child.

But there is a difference between the natural authority of the parents and the imposed authority of the teachers, which makes the authority of the parents the more to be safeguarded, the more to be valued, to be kept the more continuously unbroken.

Of the two the authority of the parents should be more important.

Yet the teachers have a long apprenticeship before they are judged to know how to exercise it; this apprenticeship covers not merely years in which to learn the subjects to be taught the children, but in which to learn how to teach at all.

Now a mother also has to teach her children many things. Does she ever learn how to teach? Is not her need to know this even greater than the need of the teachers? She should learn how to teach her children and she surely will not be able to do this without learning.

It is not that she is ignorant of this, because she is a mother; but mother-instinct, though good, is not enough to live by. There are successful mothers, and mothers who are not in the least successful. It is not merely enough to love a child to be able to help it; wise love is needed.

Love can sometimes be foolish. Natural instinct goes a long way but not all the way. Mothers, however, can learn by watching successful mothers, and seeing how they train their children, and so becoming themselves expert in the art of training.

Let them remember their own homes when they were children, and ask themselves whether their mothers failed with one or other of the children, and why. It is not books that they need to help them so much as a study of the experiences of their life.

A mother will learn more by remembering and watching and asking than by reading or having instructions in maternity clinics, though these, if carried on by sane instructors, can be of great help. Only she must remember that each child is a creature apart, and should be studied individually.

It is due to the small circumference of the home that the children can have individual treatment. That is the value of home training. It can be personal. Not all the children of a family should be treated alike. It is not just to treat everyone alike, because all are not alike. Justice demands a rich variety of treatment and perhaps this is only possible fully at home.

“As a family, try to lead a hidden life with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. Through holy Mass, offer yourselves through Mary’s hands as a sacrifice with Jesus; at Holy Communion, you will be changed into Jesus by divine grace so that you may live His life; by your visits to the tabernacle, you will enjoy His friendship in the midst of the many problems of life.” -Photo of my daughter and son-in-law at St. Joseph’s Church, Topeka, KS Quote by Fr. Lawrence G. Lovasik. The Catholic Family Handbook http://amzn.to/2oUJDFv (afflink)

Available here.

Father weaves a tapestry of the Church’s teaching on the unity of the members of Christ’s Mystical Body using profound and picturesque meditations on the seven sorrows of the Blessed Mother:

• The Prophecy of Simeon,
• The Flight Into Egypt,
• The Loss of the Young Christ,
• Mary Meets Jesus on the Road to Calvary,
• The Crucifixion,
• The Pieta, and
• The Burial of Jesus.

His thoughts are enriched by references to original color etchings of John Andrews. Ideal for Lent and Holy Week.

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you kindly for your support.

Fr. Bede Jarrett, O.P.

Nihil Obstat: PERCY JONES, Censor Diocesan

Imprimatur: D Mannix,

Archiepiscopus Melbournensis

June, 1958

Assault on Family Life

Perhaps the most sinister menace of recent years has been the assault on family life, namely, first, on the family as an institution and, secondly, on the various relationships within the family, husband and wife, father and mother, children and parents.

This assault is not indeed only of recent years, for it is to be found at the French Revolution also, and, before that, in Rousseau. But there is this to be noticed: the assault that is being made at present on the family as the single unit of society comes no longer from one quarter, but is being delivered from many different angles.

These attacks are sometimes conscious, deliberate, sometimes utterly unconscious. Thus those who advocate or denounce certain practices or principles are not always aware of what they are attacking, nor how inevitably what they hold today will lead them on to something else tomorrow, which at present they would repudiate but tomorrow will proclaim.

Thus when the practices of birth-control were first propagated, the opponents of them urged that if birth-control was taught there was no reason why abortion should not also be taught; and they were met by a very indignant denial on the part of those who favored birth-control that there was any connection between the two ideas.

No doubt this denial was sincere, but it was short-sighted and futile. The defenders of birth-control are equally now defenders of abortion. Sterilization of the unfit has already been added to their program.

It will be made compulsory, no doubt, and not merely on those that are now held to be unfit. This is merely one instance of what is happening everywhere. Again, the Lambeth bishops would have been disturbed if they had realized where their permissions were leading.

But, with false principles from which to start, there is no end to the degradation that must follow. The next Lambeth Conference, if it is honest, will either go on to further abominations or go back. Thus, under the weight of Divorce, State Education, Sterilization, the present economic organization, etc., the family is gradually being assaulted from every angle.

Family Means Motherhood

Now the first point to realize is that all these various attacks are attacks on motherhood. They are also, no doubt, in part, attacks on freedom. They are attacks on motherhood precisely because what is attacked must inevitably be the center of the family-and round the mother grows up the home.

The father is also the center, but differently. He is the active external worker; the mother’s activities are as great but they have a smaller circumference. They are limited to nearer matters. By her activities the home is kept alive and is a true home.

At no time, moreover, can she “knock off” work. Her factory has no hooter to sound the hour for stopping, her shop has no closing time, her office hours have no end. But since she is the center of the home it must be that her motherhood is most in jeopardy when the family is menaced.

In birth-control it is she who suffers, and she suffers not merely in her nerves but precisely in her motherhood. Again, it is her motherhood that is affected by divorce.

Even the most advanced defenders of divorce will admit that motherhood in its richest implications must suffer from the carrying out of their programs. They regret this but consider that it cannot be helped.

The problem of children is an old one. Always ordinary traditional Christian teaching has allowed parents to space the arrival of their children; but it forbids this to be done by direct artificial interference with nature.

It recognizes that the virtue of prudence, and also a variety of family necessities and difficulties may, under certain circumstances, allow a limitation to be set deliberately and legitimately to the number of children that parents may have. But it also considers that the will of man (plus the grace of God) is capable of carrying this out by the sole means of self-restraint.

Since human nature has existed for many thousands of years and has been hitherto able to restrain itself by means of its will, it seems pure assumption to say that this cannot be done now-unless, indeed, it is equally admitted that man today is far less able to control himself than he was, that instead of progressing from a lower stage to a higher he has slipped back into the lower, that the loss of religion has meant also the loss of will-power, the disbelief in God ended in disbelief in man.

We cannot, indeed, but agree that economic conditions do now make the support of a large family harder than ever. But our answer to this problem is to urge as the remedy an increase of wages and not a diminishing of the family.

If one of these two things has to happen, let wages be altered, not the family. We urge, moreover, that the money spent on this unclean trade, and on the booming of unclean practices by the trade which profits from their sale, should rather have been spent, and would have been better spent, on social propaganda for improving the circumstances of the people troubled in this way than on continuing them and exploiting the needs of the poor.

Just as the Church forbids even the man who is so poor that he can hardly house or clothe or feed his family to use artificial means to limit his family, on the definite principle that it is immoral, so also she denounces as immoral the artificial means that have made it almost impossible for him to house and feed and clothe a family.

It is society which is falsely constructed, not the family. Motherhood is blessed; therefore what blocks motherhood in the present falsely constructed society is accursed.

“Modern mothers have been relying on psychology books to interpret child behavior for so long now that if all the psychology books were burned to a crisp, few mothers could relax with the conviction that God’s love, the maternal instinct, and divine grace could take their place. What we all — little or big — want is God; if we do not realize it, however, we choose many ignoble things in His place. And if we want to teach children to be good with a goodness that’s lasting, we must teach them to be good for the love of God.”
Mary Reed Newland, How to Raise Good Catholic Children, 1954 Available here: https://amzn.to/2lEBVjy (afflink)

What happened to Veronica’s veil was simply an outward expression of what happened in Veronica’s soul. Are we “Veronica’s” in our everyday life? Do we seek to serve, to encourage, to listen….?

Package of 7 Soaps! Honeycomb, Charcoal, Eucalyptus Mint, Lemongrass, Lavender, Midnight Rose, Orange Patchouli! Pure, 100% All~Natural

Available here.

Reviews:

Love these festive soaps! Perfect for people who want non toxic….the kids have been carrying them around talking about how good they smell all day!

These soaps are beautiful and the scents are so fragrant and lovely! I love them so much, I came back to purchase more to give as Christmas gifts to family and friends. Definitely a repeat customer here!

These soaps are amazing! My family and I have extremely sensitive skin and even struggle with eczema and allergic rashes from many products. These beautiful and gentle soaps actually calm our skin and the eczema on my hands started improving right away! The scents are beautiful as well; the extra soaps we have on display and every time we walk in our bathroom, there is a gentle yet not overpowering beautiful scent. Very feminine and lovely! Thank you for making these!

Great book!

Christ urges us to pray without ceasing, but when we try to do so, many of us simply cease without praying. We’re distracted by troubles or duty or we quit just because it’s late already and we are tired.

Fr. Raoul Plus’s no-nonsense prayer manual, How to Pray Always, remedies these problems by dispelling the false notions of prayer we all have and showing how we can, in fact, pray without ceasing even at times when exhaustion cripples us and cares threaten to sweep us away.

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you kindly for your support.