Category Archives: Spiritual Tidbits

A Woman’s Happiness – The Blessed Sacrament

23 Saturday Oct 2021

Posted by in Spiritual Tidbits, Vocation

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Although written for a Sister, it can apply to all. Our best friend is Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist! What a grace, when we truly come to realize this!

We may not have our Lord in the same house with us, but He is there for us always within our heart….and to make visits to the Blessed Sacrament, to go to daily Mass is something we should strive for.

from The Catholic Teacher’s Companion by Rev. Felix M. Kirsch, O.M., 1924

It has been said that a woman’s happiness consists in loving and being loved. Here we have the deepest reason for the respect that the Sister receives from men: they honor her for having given her heart to the greatest love that can come to woman, the special love of Christ.

The same love is the source of the Sister’s strength. Frail and delicate she may be, but she does superhuman work in the schoolroom. And the source of her strength? Look at her after Holy Communion or while she kneels before the Blessed Sacrament, and you will know the source of her strength.

After hours she slips into the chapel to commune with her Lord and Spouse, and she returns to her work, refreshed and strengthened with supernatural vigor, for she has conversed with Him to who she has vowed eternal loyalty.

WOMAN’S HAPPINESS

Guynemer, the brilliant aviator, whose countrymen called him “The Bright Sword of France”, was asked whence he derived strength and courage.

He pointed to the tabernacle. Guynemer went to Communion daily.

For the Sister daily Communion and the presence of the Eucharistic King in the same house with her will be a source of untold blessings.

She should therefore esteem this privilege of living under the same roof with Christ as did Cardinal Newman when he wrote to Henry Wilberforce: “I am writing next room to the chapel. It is such an incomprehensible blessing to have Christ’s bodily Presence in one’s house, within one’s walls, as swallows up all other privileges and destroys, or should destroy, every pain. To know that He is close by—to be able again and again through the day to go in to Him…”

In the Holy Eucharist the Sister learns to understand in what consists the true liberty of children of God: Here she learns a truth which the modern world cannot understand, viz., that the highest exercise of man’s freedom is in the most perfect subjection to God’s will in all things.

How much will that lesson mean for her perfect happiness!

For of the Sister, too, we may say what the Rev. Charles Quirk, S.J., says so beautifully of the priest:

“Not my will, but Thine be done!”—

These sweet, these awful words are spun

Through all his life’s oblivion,

From rise, ah yes! to set o’ sun!

From the perfect obedience of Christ in the Holy Eucharist she will also learn to render always genuine service. We are loath to accept counterfeit money from anyone. But how often are we tempted to render counterfeit service to the Lord?

Again, the Eucharistic Presence should give the Sister a feeling of security. In the shadow of the Blessed Sacrament she may feel like the chick under the wings of the mother-hen. The chick is small and weak and helpless and lost in the darkness of its mother’s wings; yet while there it is hid away in the very safest place.

So the Sister, too, though she may be in darkness and even in the shadow of death, will be most secure as long as she remains in the shadow of God’s wings.

‘The theater of all my actions is fallen,” said an ancient hero when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theater where the audience demands their best. How fortunate is, then, the Sister, for her chief friend is Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. She may apply to herself the words of Christ: “I will not now call you servants; but I have called you friends. You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go, and bring forth fruit; and your fruit should remain.”

A friend has been described as one who knows us and yet loves us. The description is good. It shows how Christ, who knows the Sister best, is her best Friend. It shows, too, that friendship must be founded on truth.

“We all like to bring back to our mind the happy thought of our childhood days. It was at our Mother’s knee that we first began to whisper the name of God, and to make the sign of the cross, the sign of our Redemption. Our own hand being guided by that of our Mother, at the same time repeating: the words “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen”. Thus it was at home the little seed of our faith and love of God began to develop, making us the beloved and cherished children of God.” -Precious Blood and Family Prayer Book

Father Lovasik Tidbit:

Coloring pages for your children.   “It’s what we Catholics do on Sundays…”

 

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Dutch Artist: Nicolaas van der Waay, 1936

 

 

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The Hail Mary of a Protestant

19 Tuesday Oct 2021

Posted by in Praying, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 6 Comments

A little six-year-old Protestant boy had often heard his Catholic companions reciting the prayer “Hail Mary.” He liked it so much that he copied it, memorized it and would recite it every day.

“Look, Mommy, what a beautiful prayer,” he said to his mother one day.

“Never again say it,” answered the mother. “It is a superstitious prayer of Catholics who adore idols and think Mary a goddess. After all, she is a woman like any other. Come on, take this Bible and read it. It contains everything that we are bound to do and have to do.”

From that day on the little boy discontinued his daily “Hail Mary” and gave himself more time to reading the Bible instead.

One day, while reading the Gospel, he came across the passage about the Annunciation of the Angel to Our Lady. Full of joy, the little boy ran to his mother and said: “Mommy, I have found the ‘Hail Mary’ in the Bible which says: ‘Hail full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women.’ Why do you call it a superstitious prayer?”

On another occasion he found that beautiful Salutation of St. Elizabeth to the Virgin Mary and the wonderful canticle MAGNIFICAT in which Mary foretold that “the generations would call her blessed.”

He said no more about it to his mother but started to recite the “Hail Mary” every day as before. He felt pleasure in addressing those charming words to the Mother of Jesus, our Savior.

When he was fourteen, he one day heard a discussion on Our Lady among the members of his family. Every one said that Mary was a common woman like any other woman.

The boy, after listening to their erroneous reasoning could not bear it any longer, and full of indignation, he interrupted them, saying:

“Mary is not like any other children of Adam, stained with sin. No! The Angel called her FULL OF GRACE AND BLESSED AMONGST WOMEN. Mary is the Mother of Jesus Christ and consequently Mother of God.

There is no higher dignity to which a creature can be raised. The Gospel says that the generations will proclaim her blessed and you are trying to despise her and look down on her. Your spirit is not the spirit of the Gospel or of the Bible which you proclaim to be the foundation of the Christian religion.”

So deep was the impression which the boy’s talk had made that his mother many times cried out sorrowfully: “Oh my God! I fear that this son of mine will one day join the Catholic religion, the religion of Popes!”

And indeed, not very long afterwards, having made a serious study of both Protestantism and Catholicism, the boy found the latter to be the only true religion and embraced it and became one of its most ardent apostles.

Sometime after his conversion, he met his married sister who rebuked him and said indignantly: “You little know how much I love my children. Should any one of them desire to become a Catholic, I would sooner pierce his heart with a dagger than allow him to embrace the religion of the Popes!”

Her anger and temper were as furious as those of St. Paul before his conversion. However, she would change her ways, just as St. Paul did on his way to Damascus.

It so happened that one of her sons fell dangerously ill and the doctors gave up hope of recovery. Her brother then approached her and spoke to her affectionately, saying:

“My dear sister, you naturally wish to have your child cured. Very well, then, do what I ask you to do. Follow me, let us pray one ‘Hail Mary’ and promise God that, if your son recovers his health, you would seriously study the Catholic doctrine, and should you come to the conclusion that Catholicism is the only true religion, you would embrace it no matter what the sacrifices may be.”

His sister was somewhat reluctant at the beginning, but as she wished for her son’s recovery, she accepted her brother’s proposal and recited the “Hail Mary” together with him.

The next day her son was completely cured. The mother fulfilled her promise and she studied the Catholic doctrine. After long preparation she received Baptism together with her whole family, thanking her brother for being an apostle to her. The story was related during a sermon given by the Rev. Fr. Tuckwell. “Brethren,” he went on and said, “the boy who became a Catholic and converted his sister to Catholicism dedicated his whole life to the service of God.

He is the priest who is speaking to you now! What I am I owe to Our Lady.

You, too, my dear brethren, be entirely dedicated also to Our Lady and never let a day pass without saying the beautiful prayer, ‘Hail Mary’, and your Rosary.

Ask her to enlighten the minds of Protestants who are separated from the true Church of Christ founded on the Rock (Peter) and against whom the gates of hell shall never prevail.'”

A mother holds her baby in her arms, looks up to God, and knows that she, by months of suffering and patience, has co-operated with Him in making and bringing into the world a little body housing a priceless soul. A father stands above his new-born son resting in the arms of his wife, and knows as he picks him up and weighs him tenderly that he has shared with God the Father His very fatherhood; for this mite of humanity, immortal in destiny, is truly his son. Mother and father together have co-operated with God in the astonishing creation of a human being. -Fr. Daniel A. Lord, 1950’s

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Join me as I read to you this lovely article by Joseph Breig, husband and father, who wrote his thoughts about the great influence the rosary has had on his life and his family….”When I get to heaven – as I trust I shall – something very embarrassing is bound to happen. As sure as shooting; somebody who has known me rather too well for comfort on this earth is going to come up to me and say, in a loud voice enough for everybody to hear, ‘How in the world did you get in here?'”

Lovely and Graceful, these handcrafted, wire-wrapped Blessed Mother Necklaces can be blessed and worn as Sacramentals. They would make a special gift for someone! Available here.

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SSet of all 20 Children’s Saints Lives

For ages 10 and up. Great stories of the saints for youth that are easy to read; yet extremely edifying and instructing! We all need good examples how to live a good Catholic life — these books will not overwhelm or turn off those who need them most.

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The Holy Mass for Tradesmen & Artisans ~ The Hidden Treasure

17 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in Spiritual Tidbits, The Mass/The Holy Eucharist

≈ 3 Comments

A strong reminder of the efficacy of the Mass…and not to take lightly our duty to attend on Sundays and Holydays of Obligation…

FOR TRADESMEN AND ARTISANS

The idol of our times is self-interest, and, alas, how many prostrate themselves before it offering to it at all times and in all places their undivided homage!

And thence it comes that, pursuing this idol, they forget the true God, and so come to plunge themselves into an abyss of evil, and a perpetual destitution of all true good; whereas, the holy Royal Prophet declares that all who in the first place seek God shall not encounter any evil, but shall abound in all good. Inquirentes Dominum non deficient omni bono (Ps. 33:11).

This is amply verified in those who, before applying to their business, manage first to assist at holy Mass, as the adventure which is told of certain traders of Gubbio well illustrates.

They had gone to a public fair held in the town of Cisternino, and having made a clearance of their wares, two of them began to speak of going, and fixed to start the next day at dawn, so as to arrive by evening in their own neighborhood.

But the third would not consent to start then, and protested that, next day being Sunday, he could never think of commencing a journey without having first heard holy Mass; that then, after a little food, they might take their departure more to their satisfaction, and that, should they not succeed in getting to Gubbio that evening, there was no want of comfortable inns on the road.

His companions did not yield to this wise and salutary counsel, but, bent on arriving at home next night, they answered that Almighty God would have compassion on them if they lost Mass for once.

So on Sunday morning before dawn, without ever entering church, they took their way on horseback toward home. They arrived near the river Corfuone.

By the violent rain which had fallen during the night it was now excessively swollen, and the current beating strongly against the wooden bridge had somewhat shaken and weakened it. They advanced upon it with their horses, and no sooner had they reached the middle than a still further rise and furious rush of the flood broke down and swept away the whole structure.

The two unhappy traders were, of course, plunged with their horses into the river and drowned, losing at once their money, their goods, their lives.

At the sound of the crash, and sight of the havoc, the peasants ran to the spot, and contrived with hooks to draw the corpses out, which they then left stretched out on the bank, in order that, if possible, they might be recognized and obtain burial.

Soon after, the third trader, who had been detained by his wish to satisfy the precept of attending Mass, and who had then taken to the road with joyful alacrity, came up to the river and beheld the two bodies on the bank.

Drawing up to observe them, he instantly recognized his two companions, and heard from the bystanders all the miserable catastrophe with the utmost agitation of spirit.

Then he lifted his hands to Heaven, returning thanks to the Most High, Who had so mercifully preserved him; and he blessed a thousand times the hour in which he assisted at the Holy Sacrifice, clearly recognizing the source of his safety.

When again at home, he announced the sad intelligence, got the relations to procure proper interment for the departed, and stirred up among all a lively desire of daily attendance at holy Mass. (Lohner. tom. 2, tit. 64.)

O accursed avarice!—let me give vent to what I feel— accursed passion, that cuttest off the heart from God, and takest away, as it were, from us the very faculty of free will, so far as regards the power of attending to the great business of eternal salvation!

That the avaricious may enter into themselves, I will illustrate my meaning by an example from Holy Scripture.

Samson, you are aware, was bound in vain even with the sinews of oxen, and with fresh ropes never before used. At last he informed his treacherous wife that the secret of his strength lay hid in the locks of his hair; and so no sooner were they cut off than he lost all his wonderful strength, fell into the power of the Philistines, was made blind by them, and condemned to work a mill.

Now, what was the chief and prime error of Samson? Was it, perhaps, in allowing himself to be so securely bound? That was not his error. The evil lay in telling the secret of his strength, and thus allowing the loss of his mysterious locks, which once gone, he was no longer himself.

Now, a man engaged in trade doubtless permits himself to be bound by a thousand ties of traffic, of accounts, of exchange, and so on. Does the deadly peril of avarice consist in all this? No, not in all this. The danger lies in cutting off the locks of hair. Let me explain.

Suppose a man in trade to have never so great a pressure of business, but hearing betimes every morning the bells that call to Mass, says to himself, “Business, wait a little; have patience; let us get our Mass safely settled”: such a man is Samson bound but not shorn—bound by the thousand cords of business, but not shorn of the secret source of strength.

Another is also caught in a multitude of cords: workmen to pay, accounts to clear, letters to write, correspondents with whom to negotiate: one man expects an answer, another his money. Alas, what a labyrinth of bonds!

No matter, Sunday at last comes  round, or the festival of some saint, his patron perhaps; he breaks loose from all, and goes with devotion to hear some Masses and offer up his prayers. This man also is a Samson bound but not shorn; for, amid all his affairs, he never loses sight of the great business of eternal salvation.

But attend to me now: if you are bound by a thousand ties of interest, without vigor to snap them through, if you fail to come forth at the proper time, and cease firmly to frequent the Sacraments and the Holy Sacrifice, then woe to you; then are you both bound and shorn.

In this case, though your gains be just, yet at such a cost they are sinful; there is within you a coarse and horrid avarice, which will treat you as Samson was treated, until, at last, as with Samson, the roof overhead shall fall in upon you. Then quae parasti cujus erunt?— “whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?” (Luke 12:20.)

But you are thinking that the avaricious will never listen except to a tune in their own key. Well, then, be it so. Get rich, gather up, make profit. What is the surest way? I will show you: daily hear holy Mass with thorough devotion.

It is plainly seen in the case of two artisans whom I could point out. Both pursue the same trade; one is burdened with a family: wife, children, grandchildren; the other is alone with his wife. The first has brought up his family in great comfort and even style, and all his transactions turn out wonderfully. Customers at his shop, and sales despatched.

So he has gone on, till he finds himself putting by every year a good round sum, to serve in time for marriage-portions for his daughters. The other, who is without children, at one time got little employment, was half famished, and was, in short, a ruined man.

One day he said confidentially to his neighbor, “How is it you do? In your home there rains down every blessing of God; while I, poor wretch, cannot hold up my head, and all sorts of calamities light on my house.”

“I will tell you,” said his neighbor; “tomorrow morning I shall be with you, and will point out the place from which I draw so much.”

Next morning he took him to church to hear Mass, and then led him back to his workshop; and so two or three different times, till at last the poor man said, “If nothing else is wanted than to go to church to hear Mass, I know the way well enough, without putting you to inconvenience.”

“Just so,” said the other; “hear holy Mass, my friend, with devotion, every day, and you will see a change on the face of your fortune.”

And, in fact, so it was. Beginning to hear holy Mass every morning, he be came well provided with work, shortly paid his debts, and put his house once more in capital condition. (Sar. in Vit. S. Joan. Eleem.)

Trust to the words of the Gospel. And if you do so, how can you doubt the fact? Does it not say clearly, Quaerite primum regnum Dei. . . et haec omnia adjicientur vobis? “Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt. 6:33.)

Make but the trial for a year; hear holy Mass every morning with true earnest devotion for one year, and if your temporal interests do not take a better turn, lay the blame on me. But there is little fear of that; you will rather have many reasons to thank me.

At a certain moment when going to confession to a Capuchin father, she came to understand that it was just the opposite: her “defects did not displease God” and her littleness attracted God’s love, just as a father is moved by the weakness of his children and loves them still more as soon as he sees their good will and sincere love. ~ Fr. Jacques Philippe, The Way of Trust and Love – A Retreat Guided by St. Therese of Lisieux

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Going to the Altar….Msgr. Ronald Knox

10 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in Spiritual Tidbits, The Mass/The Holy Eucharist

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A very beautiful meditation about the Mass, the first part of the Mass, Going to the Altar. Father Knox apologizes because of the form in which it is written…to school age girls. I say, “Hurrah! Then I can understand it!” 😉

From The Mass in Slow Motion by Msgr. Ronald A. Knox, 1940’s

Glory to God in high heaven, and peace on earth to the men that are God’s friends. Luke ii.

We left the priest last Sunday at the foot of the altar; he has told us to get busy praying, and now he strides away from us; purposefully, like a man who knows what he is about; rather like our Lord going up to Judaea for his Passion, when the Gospels tell us that “ his face was set towards Jerusalem “.

I think you will find that most priests are walking rather fast, a. good deal faster than their usual pace, over those two or three steps. Indeed, if you could see inside the priest’s mind, you would almost say he was running up the steps.

It reminds me of some lines in a poem none of you know, a poem called “ David in Heaven.” It says there “His feet trip without a slip, Going to the altar “.

Well, of course it wouldn’t really do to run; it isn’t a bit easy to run upstairs in a cassock, and then there is generally lace on the end of one’s alb, on purpose so that one shall put one’s foot through it if one isn’t careful. And besides, the motion of that dance is meant to be slow all through.

But the priest is mentally running, so to speak; all through that business with the server which we were talking about last Sunday he has been tantalizing himself, as it were, by not going up just yet; very much as some of you would tantalize yourselves, on receiving a really exciting parcel, by insisting on undoing the knots before you looked inside it.

The priest rushes up to the altar and kisses it; he can’t hold himself in any longer. He didn’t kiss it when he went up before, to arrange the things, because he wasn’t really beginning the Mass then. Now he goes up and kisses it. And the meaning of that movement in the dance is obvious, I hope, even to the stupidest of us.

It is meant to express the great desire we ought to have for God, the desire to get closer to Him, get in contact with Him, which is the real reason for our saying any prayers at all.

What he kisses, actually, is the corporal, the big white thing folded in nine squares which he takes out of the large green envelope on the top of the chalice.

Underneath the corporal is-what? Three thicknesses of altar-cloth. Underneath the altar-cloths is-what? A piece of stone all wrapped up in waxed cloth, so as to be waterproof.

That stone has been consecrated long ago, by a bishop; and the bishop in consecrating it fills up some holes in it with-what do you think? Tiny bits of relics of the saints.

People used to use relics of that kind rather freely in the Middle Ages; they used to put them into bridges, for instance, so as to be sure that the bridges held up.

I know a very old bridge on the upper Thames where you can still see, in the masonry at the side, a kind of socket where they obviously used to keep the relics of some saint long ago.

King Henry the Sixth (no, not King Henry the Eighth; King Henry the Sixth, Wars of the Roses) used to be regarded as a saint before the Reformation, and they kept a relic of his on the bridge between Caversham and Reading, and another relic of his, so I’ve been told, on the bridge at Bridgnorth.

Well, that’s all beside the point; nowadays it is only altars that have to have relics in them; but they’ve jolly well got to.

Even a military chaplain carries round with him an altar stone, with relics let into it, and he must never say Mass without having that stone on the soap-box or whatever it is he is using for an altar.

And if you ask why the Church should insist on that rather inconvenient regulation, the simplest answer is this; if he didn’t, he would start the Mass by telling a lie.

I hope you all remember that the Mass proper hasn’t started yet; all that preparation business we were talking about last Sunday was only preparation really.

Now, just as he is going to begin the Mass proper, the priest rushes up to the altar, kisses it, and says, “We beseech thee, O Lord, by the merits of those saints whose relics are here, and of all the saints, to be indulgent towards my sins”.

The saints whose relics are here – why is that so important? Why, because in the very early days, when the Christians at Rome were being persecuted, they used to meet for worship in the catacombs just outside the city.

The catacombs are miles and miles of underground passages, which you can still explore with a guide if you go out to Rome. There the Christians used to bury the poor mangled remains of their friends who had been killed in the persecution; and on the tombstones raised over these bodies of the martyrs the Roman bishop used to say Mass.

And when the priest, saying those words, kisses the tiny relics tucked away in the altar-stone, he reminds himself, if he has any sense of history, that by that action he is putting himself in touch, so to speak, with the Universal Church that is in Communion with Rome.

All altars, all over the world, are one altar really, the mother altar of Christendom; all altars must have relics in them, so as to remind us that we belong to the martyrs of the first century, and they to us.

St. John, in the Apocalypse, says “I saw beneath the altar the souls of all who had been slain for love of God’s Word”; some people think that is a reference to this habit of saying Mass over the martyrs’ tombs – it’s as old as that.

And when you see the priest kissing the altar just then, you may think of Christian history, all through these nineteen centuries, as linked up. The Mass is all one, in A.D. 48 or in A.D.1948; the Mass is all one, in the catacombs at Rome or in the tin chapel.

That altar-stone is a kind of keyhole through which you get a glimpse into the whole of our Christian past.

I would say this – that by far the easiest and least troublesome way of rearing a family of which you can be proud is to institute the family rosary in your home, and keep it up. It knits the family together with bonds 10,000 times stronger than any that can be forged by merely natural means. -Joseph Breig, 1950’s

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At the tender age of twenty, the Rosary and the Consecration to Our Lady (St. Louis de Montfort style) was what set my feet on solid ground in a world that spun around me with all sorts of “answers” to life’s problems. And I wanted answers…

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My Little Story About the Rosary….

07 Thursday Oct 2021

Posted by in by Leane Vdp, Spiritual Tidbits, The Rosary

≈ 7 Comments

What a beautiful feast day…..The Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary! I thought I would repost this today:

Here is my little story of the Rosary…..

I’m a slow learner.

Sometimes it just takes me a long time to “get” some things.

At the tender age of twenty, the Rosary and the Consecration to Our Lady (St. Louis de Montfort style) was what set my feet on solid ground in a world that spun around me with all sorts of “answers” to life’s problems. And I wanted answers.

My friends were leaving the Catholic Church that was rocked by liberalism and they were going to greener pastures. It was all beckoning to me. The Catholic Church I attended didn’t seem to hold out any answers. I had attended a Catholic School and went to Mass every Sunday all my growing up years. I was involved in youth groups and church choirs. And yet I didn’t know about the True Presence until I was almost 20 years old! There was an emptiness…. but I didn’t know what the problem was.

Then something happened. I went to a few classes on St. Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion to Mary. I didn’t like them but I stepped out in faith and began by saying a decade of the rosary each day (while my thoughts traveled to those naysayers saying  “repetition of words are useless…dumb”….they also said…”IDOLATRY…you can’t pray to Mary”) but I persevered…..And then I consecrated myself to Our Lady…(once again, the horrible doubts and misgivings…) I did it anyway. It was not very comfortable.

I met hubby. We began our courtship and our marriage with the rosary…daily. It was a commitment. It wasn’t wonderful…or beautiful…. It was a commitment.

We had children. Many children. We said the rosary. So often, it seemed fruitless. Life was so distracted, so wrought with the everyday little crosses and duties…but it was a commitment and we stuck to it.

I knew it was a good thing. I knew Our Lady asked for the Family Rosary at Fatima:“I am the Lady of the Rosary. Continue to always pray the Rosary every day.” I believed. I was committed. Hubby was always committed. 🙂

I see now the fruits. I look around at a very crazy world and thank God through tears for what He has given to us…through no merit of our own.

I know that we could have really messed up. We were two people coming from very different backgrounds….both very strong-willed. We made our mistakes…..but we had the Rosary. And we stuck with it, day in and day out, year after year.

A family that prays together, stays together. I know that is not everything. If we have an open heart, the Rosary gives us the graces to make the necessary changes as we need them.Feb. 14, 2014 005-001The Daily Family Rosary. Steady, Constant. Amid the crosses of daily life with many children, the misunderstandings between husband and wife, the financial burdens…we had the rosary.

When the kids got hurt or sick, when I was very ill, when hubby was in the hospital and we had no money to pay, through tragedies, accidents and fires, when I didn’t understand why God was letting things happen to us…. we were saying the Rosary.

Steady and constant, we prayed it every day, amid slouching kids, tired husband, cranky, pregnant wife.

Thank God for that Rosary. I know my life is not done yet. We still have children at home, children who can….and will….make a lot of mistakes. But for the record, they all (married ones, too) put their Faith first, amid their own struggles. They say the daily Rosary and it will be what holds them together through thick and thin.

If you have troubles, say the Rosary. If, amid your noisy and boisterous family, you are suffering loneliness, say the Rosary. Do you have fears and worries? Say the Rosary. Are your rosaries dry and distracted?…Keep saying it.

Truly, who knows better than Our Lady, Our Mother, our humanness, our failings, how small we are, how distracted we are. She will help. Persevere. Don’t give up.

It is just now that I am beginning more to understand the beauty, the mystery, the  deep, interior, spiritual growth that can take place through the Rosary. Like I said, I am a slow learner.

I am glad that God is very, very patient.

He has given us a very special gift. Don’t take it for granted and don’t go a day without saying it!

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The Annunciation “Hail, Full of Grace”

Another day had begun in the little home of Nazareth – a quiet, cool March day. Mary would spend it as she had spent countless others, quietly working about the house.

An ordinary girl, Mary, as the world judges; ordinary like the rest of the villagers, like Joseph…

Suddenly an angel was by her side: “Hail, full of grace!“

An ordinary person would be rather disturbed by such a visitor, and by such a greeting. And Mary was! “She was troubled at his word.“

The angel had implied that Mary loved God with all her heart, soul, mind, strength; that she loved God enough to become His Mother.
Loving God wholeheartedly – like Mary, I was created to do just that – and being “ordinary“ puts no barriers in my way!

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“It is difficult for a child to be better than his home environment or for a nation to be superior to the level of its home life. In fulfilling its double purpose – the generation and formation of children – the home becomes a little world in itself, self-sufficient even in its youngest years. It is vital that you, as a mother or father, make of your home a training ground in character-building for your children, who will inherit the world’s problems. Home is a place in which the young grow in harmony with all that is good and noble, where hardship, happiness, and work are shared.” – Father Lawrence G. Lovasik
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Women historically have been denigrated as lower than men or viewed as privileged. Dr. Alice von Hildebrand characterizes the difference between such views as based on whether man’s vision is secularistic or steeped in the supernatural. She shows that feminism’s attempts to gain equality with men by imitation of men is unnatural, foolish, destructive, and self-defeating. The Blessed Mother’s role in the Incarnation points to the true privilege of being a woman. Both virginity and maternity meet in Mary who exhibits the feminine gifts of purity, receptivity to God’s word, and life-giving nurturance at their highest.

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“Despite My Littleness…” – St. Therese, the Little Flower

03 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in Feast Days, Spiritual Tidbits, Virtues

≈ 2 Comments

Happy Feast of St. Therese of Lisieux!

by Father Jacques Philippe, The Way of Trust and Love – A Retreat Guided by St. Therese of Lisieux

Thérèse wanted to be a saint not out of ambition or vainglory, but in order to love God as much as he can be loved. That is completely in accordance with the Gospel.

She also very much wanted to be useful to the Church, and she felt that the only way she could do that was by aiming for holiness with all her strength.

But … alas, I have always realized, when I compared myself to the saints, that there is between them and me the same difference as exists between a mountain whose summit is lost in the heavens, and the obscure grain of sand trodden underfoot by passers-by.

Thérèse very soon realized that what she wanted was impossible. Despite all her good will and her ardent desires, she was quickly brought face-to-face with her limitations and had the feeling that her desire for holiness was inaccessible, unrealizable. She felt as though there were the same distance between that ideal of holiness and what she could actually do as between a high mountain and a grain of sand.

It should be said that at the time she lived, at the end of the nineteenth century, people still tended to identify the idea of sainthood with the kind of exceptional perfection that involved heroic enterprises, extraordinary graces, etc.

Thérèse felt an insuperable distance between that model and what she was in her everyday life. Her words should be taken very seriously. She was faced with a real difficulty and unquestionably went through a real inner crisis. The temptation in that kind of situation is discouragement: I’ll never get there!

How did Thérèse react? She goes on:

Instead of getting discouraged, I said to myself: “God could not inspire us with desires that were unrealizable, so despite my littleness I can aspire to holiness.”

Here is a very beautiful aspect of Thérèse’s spiritual personality: her great simplicity, her trust in God. If God has put this desire in me—and I’ve had it for years, that’s why I entered Carmel—then it must be realizable. The desire has always been with me. It can’t be an illusion, because God is just in all his ways.

We are looking at one of the paradoxes of Thérèse’s life: on the one hand, great psychological weaknesses and great sufferings; but despite this, on the other hand, always great desires.

Lest we idealize Thérèse, recall what she was like at almost fourteen, before the healing grace that came to her at Christmas 1886.

She was a very intelligent little girl, but she had not followed a normal school life because she could not adapt to the school run by Benedictine sisters to which she had been sent. She was hypersensitive, very dependent on others, and had an enormous need for gratitude.

When she had done some little act of service, such as watering the flowers, and no one thanked her, it was a full-scale drama for her. If by chance she had hurt someone she loved, she cried about it, and then, as she says, “cried for having cried.” “I was so oversensitive that I was unbearable.”

She was “enclosed in a narrow circle that she could not get out of.”

Yet at the same time she had a very deep life of prayer and a true desire for holiness. It took the grace of Christmas 1886 to sort out this tangle, so to speak. I shall say a little about it here, and invite you to read the passage where she describes it.

Briefly, then, after Communion at Midnight Mass, our Lord inspired Thérèse to make an act of courage to overcome her hypersensitivity. The youngest of the Martin girls, she was still treated rather like a child: at Christmas, there were gifts left for her by the fireplace, and so on.

Their father, Mr. Martin, despite his affection for his youngest child, was beginning to be a little tired of all this. The comment escaped him, “This is the last time, luckily!”

Thérèse heard this and it hurt her terribly; she was tempted, as usual, to cry like a child, which would have spoilt the whole family’s Christmas.

She tells how she received a grace at that moment which can be understood as follows. It was as if God made her understand, “That’s it, finished.”

She received a sort of intuition, like a call from the Holy Spirit: “No, Thérèse, that childishness is over, you can’t let yourself go and spoil Christmas for the others!” That is not exactly what the text says, but I think that’s what it means.

So she made an act of courage: she acted as though nothing had happened, looked as joyful and happy as she could, unwrapped her presents with laughter and thanks, and, astonishingly, was cured from that moment on.

She herself says she recovered the strength of mind she had lost at the age of four when her mother died, an event that traumatized her and lay at the root of all her emotional fragility.

After that, she was able to enter Carmel and embark on her wonderful, courageous way of life, undertaking a “giant’s race,” as she puts it.

I am telling you this to help you understand something:

It may happen that God works a deep cure in us through totally insignificant events. Sometimes we are called by God to come out of ourselves, to take several steps forward, to become more adult and free.

We turn round and round inside ourselves, enclosed in our immaturity, complaints, lamentations, and dependencies, until suddenly a day of grace arrives, a gift from God, who nevertheless also calls upon our freedom.

We have a choice to make, for it is at the same time a cure and a conversion: our freedom has to opt for an act of courage.

Making an act of courage even over some very small thing, which is what God is asking of us, can open the gate to in-depth cures, to a new freedom granted us by God.

We all need cures in order to become more adult in the faith, to be courageous in waging the battle that we must wage in the Church today. To be a Christian in this day and age is not easy.

We will receive the courage and strength it requires if we can say yes to what God asks of us.

So let’s put this question to God: “What is the ‘yes’ you are asking me for today? The little act of courage and trust you’re calling me to make today?” What is the little conversion, the door that opens to let in the Holy Spirit? For if we make it, God’s grace will visit us and touch us in the depths of our being.

I am convinced that many of us will receive new strength from God. The door through which this strength enters us is the “yes” we say to our Lord to something he asks of us—something perhaps very small, perhaps rather more important, according as he gives us to understand.

“At a certain moment when going to confession to a Capuchin father, St. Therese came to understand that it was just the opposite: her “defects did not displease God” and her littleness attracted God’s love, just as a father is moved by the weakness of his children and loves them still more as soon as he sees their good will and sincere love.” -Fr. Jacques Philippe,The Way of Trust and Love, http://amzn.to/2fpXVzl Painting by Millie Childers

Happy Feast of St. Therese of Lisieux! Dear Little Flower, pray for us!

Follow this link for instructions on how to make the Sacrifice Beads, invented by St. Therese!

A coloring page for your little people….

A conference by Bishop Fulton Sheen:

Miracles of the Little Flower:

A little reminder of the devotion of Divine Mercy along with the teaching of the little flower on having trust in Our Lord.

 

 

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Repetitive Prayers

18 Saturday Sep 2021

Posted by in Praying, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 3 Comments

From Thirsting for Prayer by Father Jacques Philippe

Besides all that has just been said, one means used to foster continual prayer, especially by religious, is to repeat short phrases, often taken from or inspired by Scripture. This is done either during the time devoted to prayer or outside it, during other activities, to keep God always in mind.

According to John Cassian, certain monks in Egypt in the fourth century used to repeat the following invocation ceaselessly: “O God, make haste to my rescue, Lord, come to my aid!” (Ps 70:1).

The beautiful book The Way of a Pilgrim spread the knowledge and practice of the “Jesus Prayer” or “prayer of the heart” in the Western world. It tells of a humble Russian peasant who was moved by the exhortation in the Letter to the Thessalonians “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes 5:17), and wondered how he could put this command into practice.

He traveled through Russia in search of a spiritual father who could teach him. A monk initiated him into the tradition of prayer that consists of ceaselessly repeating, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!,” using a simple rosary of knotted woolen thread and coordinating the recital of the prayer with the rhythm of one’s breathing, while looking into one’s heart.

Little by little, the peasant experienced the benefits: his heart was filled with peace and purified, he felt the joy of God’s presence, he received inner enlightenment about God’s love, developed compassion toward everyone, and saw the world and nature with new eyes.

This tradition goes back to the Egyptian monasticism of the first centuries and spread throughout Orthodox Christianity; in our days it is also spreading through the Western world.

More familiar to Western Catholics is the devotion of the Rosary, with its constant repetition of the Our Father and Hail Mary.

Today, simple repetition does not always get good press. Ours is a world that, having lost its sense of the most fundamental things in life, is permanently in search of novelty.

Now, it is true that repetition can become merely mechanical and routine, but it can also mean that love is being inscribed on the soul for as long as it continues.

It an intrinsic part of life: we are lucky our hearts don’t get tired of constantly beating and our breathing does not get tired of its rhythm!

Rhythm, as I said earlier, plays a fundamental role in human life. It has a calming effect; it allows energy to be used for a considerable length of time without wastage or exhaustion.

The rhythm of repetitive prayer enables a desire, an intention, to be expressed externally through the body and at the same time to take root in the heart. It is an acceptance of reality, of the fact of having bodies, and that our human condition is part of the rhythms of nature and life.

It is openness to a deep meaning that surpasses us, going beyond the perceptions of the rational mind. It gives us access to a sort of wisdom, an intelligence of life, in a dependence on our Creator to which we consent.

Our prayer is called to become not just one activity among others but the fundamental activity of our lives, the very rhythm of our deepest existence, the breathing of our heart, so to speak.

Repetitive prayers help us achieve this, since they are our human effort, our persevering quest, in the hope that God’s grace will grant that for which we ask through our humble, untiring repetition of the same words.

In a talk on the Rosary given at Lourdes in October 1998, Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, said: If we love someone, we know that it is not enough to tell them “I love you” just once. We will want to say it again and again, and we may hope that they wish to hear it again and again.

  1. K. Chesterton argued that repetition is a characteristic of the vitality of children, who like the same stories, with the same words, time and time again, not because they are bored and unimaginative but because they delight in life.

Chesterton wrote: “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again!’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead, for grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again!’ to the sun; and every evening ‘Do it again!’ to the moon.

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes each daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg .

There is nothing in the least wrong with spending our time of prayer on these repetitive prayers, especially at moments of tiredness, difficulty in mobilizing our intellectual faculties, or else when we feel impelled by the Holy Spirit toward a prayer that, in comparison with meditation, is poorer, simpler, brought back to essentials, not relying too much on intellectual discourse or the work of imagination, but favoring the work of the heart.

This repetition should be done gently, peacefully, without its becoming forced or requiring an effort (which would be counterproductive). We should be attentive to God’s presence in us, while gently merging body and spirit with the form of prayer used.

The rhythm of the repetition can favor our entering into a state of recollection. Being faithful to the humble but sincere search for God expressed in this prayer can give us, little by little, the grace to enter into a state of true contemplation and loving union with God.

The advantage of these repetitive prayers, besides their simplicity, is that they can progressively become a sort of habit (in the good sense of the word); that makes them a valuable resource for praying at many other moments of the day besides the time devoted to prayer properly so called.

It may be when we are in the car, walking, during times of insomnia, while engaged in activities or jobs that do not take up the whole of our mind, etc.

How many opportunities do we, as wives and mothers, have each day to do God’s will, not our own?? Many….many. We do not need a retreat to figure this out. A wife and a mother’s journey is laying down her life for those she loves. And we prove it each time we tend to the needs around us. We learn that most important life-lesson that the hermit in the desert is learning…..to lay down our lives for Christ.-Finer Femininity, Painting by Trent Gudmundsen

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God Watches Over Us

12 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by in Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 1 Comment

from An Easy Way to Become a Saint – Fr. Paul O’Sullivan

The Gift of Divine Grace

Scarcely had we been born when our parents took us to the baptismal font. We had come into the world covered with a hideous leprosy, the filth and corruption of Original Sin, which we inherited from our First Parents.

The baptismal water was poured on our heads; we were bathed in the Precious Blood of Jesus, the same that was shed for us on Calvary.

These saving waters cleansed our souls from this hideous leprosy, leaving them as pure as the Angels in Heaven, while God, by an infinitely divine act of love, clothed our souls with a dazzling mantle taken from His own shoulders, viz., with the robe of Divine Grace.

This is a real participation in His own divine nature, as St. Peter assures us.

Did we see our soul clad in this divine mantle, we should be inclined to fall down and adore it. Nothing on this earth can give us even a faint idea of a soul in Grace – an image of God, radiant, resplendent with divine beauty.

This divine grace is not only a robe of beauty; it is a divine force, a new life, which raises up our natures, giving them a new dignity.

It penetrates into our faculties, illuminates our intellects and strengthens our will.

With it we can see and do what would be otherwise utterly impossible for poor human nature.

How little do we understand the wonders God has done for us!

Foolish, ignorant parents are so blind that they sometimes leave their children for days without Baptism.

The life of the newly born babe is so fragile that is may die at any moment, and then! That dear soul will never see God, through the culpable neglect of those who should love it most.

And even if the child does not die, why leave it wallowing in the corruption and filth of Original sin?

Fathers and mothers strive to save their children from the least bodily defect, yet owing to crass ignorance, they allow them to remain so long under the curse and malediction of sin. Sad, woeful ignorance!

God Watches Over Us

Nothing perhaps manifests so clearly God’s personal love for each one of us as His Divine Providence, which is watching over us every moment and in every event of our lives.

God has never taken His eyes off us since the moment of our creation, but is ever watching over us with loving care.

Nothing happens to us that He does not see and permit. Not even a hair falls from our heads without His consent.

Every moment of our lives is a new creation; our preservation is, as it were, a continual series of creations.

Did God forget us or take His Hand off us for a single moment, we should not only die, but fall back into our former nothingness.

He takes care of the beasts that roam in the forests, of the little birds that fly in the air; He clothes the lilies of the field in a garb more beautiful than that of Solomon in all his glory,

He sees every movement of the little fishes in the ocean, of the insects which are hidden in the earth.

With far greater reason, He tells us, does He watch over us who are His dear children, so that all that happens to us is for our welfare and happiness, as St. Paul tells us: “All things work together unto good.” (Rom. 8:28)

Nothing is so touching as the care a mother takes of her little one who is playing at her side. She is apparently intent on her sewing or knitting, but not for an instant does she lose sight of the child.

At the first sign of danger, throwing aside what she has in hand, she rushes toward the little one and snatches it from the peril that threatened it.

This is exactly how God watches over us. His eyes are ever on us. Though we may think that our troubles come from an enemy or from some other cause or by chance, we may be sure that nothing happens to us that God does not will.

What is lacking is our want of confidence. If we only ran to God in all our troubles, our lot in life would be very different from what it is, very much happier.

 
“A person is made better or worse by his friends. If they are well chosen and faithful they build up and make strong the best that is in one; but if they are unwisely chosen they drag down and destroy all that is pure within. For a person will be like his friends. Show me the friends of a girl, those whom she most appreciates, and I will tell you what kind of girl she is though I never see her.” -Mabel hale, Beautiful Girlhood, http://amzn.to/2oepsGH (afflink)

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The Dispositions that Make Prayer Fruitful

29 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Praying, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 3 Comments

From Thirsting for Prayer by Father Jacques Philippe

The dispositions that make prayer fruitful

Now let us tackle the question of discerning the genuineness of our prayer from a different angle: not the fruits it brings, but the way we set about praying.

A first point (which follows from what I am going to say later, but it is good to emphasize it) is that fidelity should be a principle quality of prayer. Jesus does not ask us to pray well; he asks us to pray without ceasing!

Faithfulness (if, of course, it is not just routine, but is motivated by a sincere desire to find God, please Him, and love Him) will produce all the rest. The main battle in the prayer life is perseverance.

As St. Teresa of Avila notes, the devil does all he can to get souls away from faithfulness to prayer, using every possible or imaginable excuse: it’s pointless, you’re not worthy to pray, you’re wasting your time, you’ll pray better if you put it off till tomorrow, there’s this urgent thing you really must do now, it would be a shame to miss that fantastic TV program, what are people going to think of you, etc.

St. Teresa explains that it is natural for the devil to put up a stiff fight on this point, for someone faithful to prayer is quite certainly lost to him. That person may still fall often, but after each fall he or she will have the grace to rise up again even higher than before.

In order to gain his end, the devil is quite right to use no half-measures on this point! Deceiver that he is, he knows that the souls who persevere in prayer are lost to him, that all the falls he brings about only help them, with God’s grace, to spring up again much higher than before and serve our Lord better: hence his determination on this point.

She invites us, therefore, to persevere in prayer,

no matter what happens or could happen, whatever the difficulties or nay-sayers, whether we reach our goal or perish on the way, whether we lack the courage to tackle the trials of the journey or the world collapses around us!

Prayer vivified by faith, hope, and love

The idea I am going to develop now is simple but very important, and it can provide us with some valuable markers on our personal journey, especially in dealing with the difficulties we meet in our prayer life.

It is this: our prayer will be good and fruitful if it is based on faith, hope, and love. It should be supported by the exercise of the three “theological virtues,” as they are classically called, which are given so much importance in Scripture (particularly in the teachings of St. Paul), because it is they that drive all Christian life.

Having decided to dedicate time to personal prayer, we can set about it in all sorts of different ways: meditate on a passage from Scripture; recite a psalm slowly; converse freely with our Lord; let our heart sing; say our Rosary or use some other form of repetitive prayer; just be there in front of our Lord without saying anything, in an attitude of simple availability or adoration; and so on.

We will return to these different possibilities later on; we are free to use them according to what suits us best at a given point.

What matters, however, is not what particular method we use, but to ascertain the basic dispositions of our heart when we pray. It is these inner dispositions, not a technique or particular form of prayer, that guarantee the fruitfulness of our prayer life.

What matters ultimately is that when we start to pray, when we use this or that method in order to pray, we base everything on inner dispositions of faith, hope, and love.

The gateway of faith

Prayer is essentially an act of faith. It is even the first and most natural way to express our faith.

If someone said, “I believe in God, but I don’t pray,” you could reasonably ask that person, “What God do you believe in? If the God you believe in is the God of the Bible, the living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God with whom Jesus spent his nights in prayer, calling him ‘Abba!’—how could you possibly not feel the slightest desire to talk to him?”

Faith is expressed, renewed, purified, and strengthened when exercised in prayer. Even if we do not realize it (like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who had been speaking prose all his life without realizing it), as soon as we start to pray we are making an act of faith: that God exists, that it is worthwhile speaking to Him and listening for what He will say, that He loves us, that it is a good thing to spend some of our time with Him, etc.

Every prayer contains an act of faith that is implicit but absolutely fundamental.

It is very encouraging to understand that it is this act of faith that unites us to God. “The more faith a soul has, the more he or she is united to God,” says St. John of the Cross.

What brings about union with God is not feelings or thought processes, but faith.

“Many times God allows it to be hard to pray, simply to school us in applying our wills, to teach us that the value of prayer does not depend on the amount of emotion we can whip up. So when ‘Time for prayers’ is greeted with moans and groans, it’s time to explain that saying prayers when you least want to, simply because you love God and have a kind of dry respect and a sense of obedience, is to gain the greatest merit for them. Many times the saints had trouble getting excited about prayers, but they said them, because prayers were due and their value had nothing to do with how eagerly they went about saying them.” -Mary Reed Newland

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 Prayer as a Place to Find Inner Peace

22 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Peace....Leaving Worry Behind, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 3 Comments

From Thirsting for Prayer by Father Jacques Philippe

“The tree is known by its fruit,” says our Lord in the Gospel (Mt 12:33).

If our prayer is genuine, it will bear fruit: it will make us humbler, gentler, more patient, more trusting, etc. It will bring all the “fruits of the Spirit” little by little to flower in our lives.

St. Paul gives a list in the Letter to the Galatians: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentle ness, self-control …” (Gal 5:22–23).

Above all, genuine prayer will make us love God and our neighbor more. Charity is the fruit and the ultimate criterion of every prayer life. “If I have not love, I am nothing,” asserts St. Paul forcefully (1 Cor 13:1–3).

Without wishing to deny the absolute priority of this criterion (though I would ask: is it possible to measure the degree of our love?), I believe that for practical purposes we won’t go wrong if we take peace as the criterion.

People’s prayer lives can be said to be basically “on track” if they experience them as a place of quiet, a place where they find peace. They can say:

My prayer isn’t wonderful, I’m far from being one of the great mystics, I often have distractions and times of dryness; most of the time I don’t feel very much, and I certainly don’t claim to have reached the pinnacle of the spiritual life.

Despite that, I recognize that for me, the fact of keeping these regular appointments with our Lord is producing an effect of inner pacification. This peace is not something I always feel with the same intensity, but it is often the result of my times of prayer.

These times of prayer enable me to be more tranquil, more confident, to stand back from my problems and worries, and not be so traumatized by the difficulties that weigh me down …

And I feel that this peacefulness, this objectivity about my worries, is not the fruit of my reflections or any psychological efforts I may make, but comes as a gift, a grace.

Sometimes it comes quite unexpectedly: I might have every reason to be stressed, and suddenly my heart receives a sense of tranquility that I know very well is not produced by myself. It comes from Someone else… .

If we think carefully about this, we see that it could not be otherwise: God is an ocean, an abyss of peace. If our prayer is sincere and really brings us into communion with Him, part of that divine peace cannot fail to be transmitted to us.

In God there is an intensity of life whose power we cannot begin to measure: “The Lord your God is a devouring fire” (Dt 4:24). And at the same time, there is in God a gentleness and peace of infinite depth, which is at least in part bestowed upon our hearts when we hold ourselves in humble openness to Jis presence.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28); “The peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:7).

This gift of inner peace is a precious one, because in this aura of peace love can grow. This peace makes us ready for the work of grace and facilitates our discernment of situations and decisions that need to be taken.

Obviously it is not always experienced in the same way; it is normal for us to have ups and downs in this area, to go through times of trial in which we find ourselves filled with worry and cannot easily rid ourselves of it.

But my statement remains true: if, taken altogether, in the long term, we experience our prayer life as a habitual source of inner peace, it is a very good sign.

On the other hand, in the absence of that experience we should ask ourselves some questions. This is a sign that we are not praying enough or that our inner dispositions are not what they should be.

In such cases it seems to me necessary that we open our hearts to a spiritual companion or guide. I would add in conclusion that one of the most valuable fruits of prayer is purity of heart. Prayer contains a great power of inner purification.

In prayer, the heart is calmed, simplified, and redirected toward God. What is a pure heart, if not a heart entirely turned toward God, in the trusting desire to love him truly and do his whole will?

“You cannot teach what you do not know yourselves. Teach them to love God, to love Christ, to love our Mother the Church and the pastors of the Church who are your guides. Love the catechism and teach your children to love it; it is the great handbook of the love and fear of God, of Christian wisdom and of eternal life.” -Pope Pius XII

As summer wanes, the gardens are ripe with flowers, the Mary Garden is peaceful and lovely. Come, take a short walk with me….

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