Using this for some spiritual reading 🙏 such an important message
Using this for some spiritual reading 🙏 such an important message
Sociologists tell us that family life & relationships between people have degenerated. There is a want of sensitivity & delicacy toward one another. Maybe [we have] put less stress upon those common courtesies & urbanities which make up life. Little affection is shown between husband & wife, mother & children, or father & children. I mean a show of affection; there is love in providing for them, but the manifestation of love has gone into decline.
As we see the laity coming into church Sundays, we ask them, do you really love one another? Are you a unified element in the community? Are you coming together just to fulfill an obligation, trying to avoid mortal sin rather than to come in to strengthen and feed a life which you ought to spread? Are you seeking a kind of selfish sanctification, forgetful that our Blessed Lord said, 'For their sakes do I sanctify myself.'
"But though we die now, we are going to have a resurrection. What are we dying to? We're dying to the lower part of ourselves, the old Adam so that the Christ life, the new creature in us, will have a new risen strength. In communion, therefore, Christ is saying to us, you give me your time, I will give you my eternity. You give me your death, I will give you my life. You give me your nothingness, and I will give you my all."
"As I look back, I know very well that I have never received the punishment that I deserved. God has been easy with me.... As C. S. Lewis put it, 'God whispers to us in our pleasures, he speaks to us in our conscience, & he shouts to us in our pain.' Pain is God's megaphone. And unlike the ripples that are made in a brook...the ripples of pain... narrow & narrow & come to a central point.... Not the ego, but the real person & the real self."
