Weep & Rejoice

 

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Even though we have not yet reached true blessedness, we can hope for it, for we do have a Father in heaven. He is a loving Father, and we may call to him with hearts full of joy and confidence. In this certainty a wave of blessedness will come over us, and it will never leave us, even though we suffer deep anguish again and again. In this certainty we can weep and rejoice at the same time. ~Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Now is Eternity

For What is God Asking?

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The earthly-minded person thinks and imagines that when he prays, the important thing – the thing he must concentrate upon – is that God should hear what he is praying for. And yet in the true, eternal sense it is just the reverse: the true relation in prayer is not when God hears what is prayed for, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears – who hears what God is asking for. ~Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations

To Save Your Life You Must Lose It

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Inspection stickers used to have printed on the back, “Drive carefully: the life you save may be your own.” That is the wisdom of men in a nutshell. What God says, on the other hand, is, “The life you save is the life you lose.” In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself; and only a life given away for love’s sake is a life worth living. To bring this point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of men’s wisdom, he was a perfect fool, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of himself is laboring not under a cross but a delusion. ~Fredrick Buechner, Listen to Your Life

The first hour belongs to God

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The duties and cares of the day crowd about us when we awake each day – if they have not already dispelled our night’s rest. How can everything be accommodated in one day? When will I do this, when that? How will it all be accomplished? Thus agitated, we are tempted to run and rush. And so we must take the reins in hand and remind ourselves, “Let go of your plans. The first hour of your morning belongs to God. Tackle the day’s work that he charges you with, and he will give you the power to accomplish it. ~St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), Essays on Woman

Finding My Righteousness

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Whatever tries to come between us and God must perish. With God’s love from above and our faith from below, whatever is in between must be crushed. From this marriage of our faith with God’s love emerges a true person. We must still go through struggles. It is good when we have to fight hard, because then evil is placed between our faith and God’s love, and that is the place where it must be dissolved. It is precisely when evil gets stuck between me and God that I find out who I am, that I find God’s goodness in myself, and that I find righteousness. ~Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

June 24: Nativity of John the Baptist

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This is our life’s work: that Christ should come to fill the whole of our existence. Oportet ileum crescere … Then our joy will know no bounds. In the measure in which Christ, through knowledge and love, penetrates more and more into our poor lives, so will our joy overflow. ~Fr. Francis Fernandez Carvajal, In Conversation with God

Never Alone

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Those who know the Lord are never alone. Solitary times are opportunities to know him in greater depth. In order to be free for this new level of being, all self-pity must be conquered. Our self-centeredness must be reckoned for the enemy it is. God cannot squeeze into a self-centered heart. ~Anna Mow, So Who’s Afraid of Birthdays

Sts Thomas More and John Fisher, Martyrs

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Father, you confirm the true faith with the crown of martyrdom. May the prayers of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More give us the courage to proclaim our faith by the witness of our lives. Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Encounters With God in Christ

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The sacraments are direct encounters with God in Christ. In them God touches us directly, he himself, unmediated. This is the mystical life in its concentrated form, flashing out in all its intolerable brightness for one vitalizing minute. But we can only take this brightness in the measure we are there for it. Conversely, the more we expose what we are, however small that may be, the more there becomes of us. It can only be in utter mystery. What happens at communion? Confession? No human mind can comprehend the encounter because it is of its essence too personally God. ~Sr Ruth Burrows, OCD, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer

Becoming Fully Christian

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“Prayerful activity can be no substitute for time set aside exclusively for God. How sad it is that prayer in this sense is not part and parcel of the normal Christian life, and yet without it one cannot be fully Christian. People do not understand this and who is to tell them? An earlier generation had the rosary; a brief space was reserved for God and this gave Him His chance. What of today? If only Catholics were to avail themselves fully of their assistance at Mass, the reception of the sacrament of penance, their morning and night prayer; taught that God is longing to draw near to them to work in them; taught how they must hold themselves attentive before Him, not expecting ‘something to happen’ — that sort of thing has nothing to do with prayer — but believing that He is working in them. It is moving to see how in old age a habit of prayer, formed in the demanding busy years, bears rich fruit—simply, unselfconsciously.” ~Ruth Borrows, OCD, Guidelines For Mystical Prayer