A Prayer for All Hallow’s Eve

 

Celtic_CrossesFather, We thank you for your many blessings, in particular for all the holy men and women we celebrate on All Saints Day. Help us to contemplate their holiness on this eve of that holiday. And may your protection be upon all those involved in Halloween festivities during this night. We pray in Jesus name. Amen  ~ David Bennett

For more on the history of All Hallow’s Eve go here

The Jesus Prayer

Seraphim-of-Sarov

Those who have truly decided to serve the Lord God should practice the remembrance of God and uninterrupted prayer to Jesus Christ, mentally saying: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. ~St. Seraphim of Sarov

The Fellowship of the Weak

Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family. ~Fr. Henri J.M. Nouwen

Be Faithful in Small Things

MOTHER

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. Nothing is small for our good God, for he is great and we are small. That is why he lowers himself and cares to do small things, in order to offer us an opportunity to show him our love. Since he does them, they are great things, they are infinite. Nothing he does can be small. Again: practice fidelity even in the least things, not for their own sake, but for the sake of what is great – that is, the will of God. ~Bl. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, A Life for God

Burning Bridges

Firemen liquidate a heavy fire

Only the self-centered self, lost in an endless orbit around itself, can keep prayer away. How? By refusing to recognize its own need for God, its utter dependence on him, falling thus into a solipsism so perverse as to refuse the very fuel that keeps it in orbit. “The terrifying compliment,” C.S. Lewis calls it, in which God takes us so seriously as spiritual beings that we are free even to spit in his eye, burning our last bridge to beatitude. ~Regis Martin, Why Pray?

“Done Roman” and Coming Home…

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“Done Roman” and Coming Home to the Catholic Church
Marcus Grodi’s pun for life could be “Done Roman” because when he was received into the Roman Catholic Church the former Protestant pastor had found his spiritual home and was finally “done roamin’.” Grodi was brought up in a nominally Christian home, trained as a chemical engineer and eventually, after a profound adult conversion Read More…

If I Did Not Believe

DOROTHY

If I did not believe, if I did not make what is called an act of faith (and each act of faith increases our faith, and our capacity for faith), if I did not have faith that the works of mercy do lighten the sum total of suffering in the world, so that those who are suffering…somehow mysteriously find their pain lifted and some balm of consolation poured on their wounds, if I did not believe these things, the problem of evil would indeed be overwhelming. ~Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage

Our Repentance Becomes God’s Joy

HEART

”We can imagine, then, that each of our sins, our attempts to turn our back on God, kindles in him a more intense flame of love, a desire to bring us back to himself and to his saving plan… God, in Christ, shows himself to be infinitely good… God is good. Not only in himself; God is – let us say it with tears – good for us. He loves us, he seeks us out, he thinks of us, he knows us, he touches our hearts us and he waits for us. He will be – so to say – delighted on the day when we return and say: ‘Lord, in your goodness, forgive me. Thus our repentance becomes God’s joy.” ~Blessed Pope Paul VI, Homily, 23 June 1968

No Answer

No Answer

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though he shook his head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand.” Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.” ~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed 

The Doors of Hell

DOOR

God does not condemn us to hell; God wishes all humans to be saved. He will love us to all eternity, but there will exist the possibility that we do not accept the love and do not respond to it. And the refusal to accept love, the refusal to respond to it, that precisely is the meaning of hell. Hell is not a place where God puts us; it is a place where we put ourselves. The doors of hell, insofar as they have locks, have locks on the inside. ~Bishop Kallistos Ware, “Image and Likeness,” Parabola Magazine, Volume 10, Number 1: Wholeness