“After you have made a decision that is pleasing to God, the Devil may try to make you have second thoughts. Intensify your prayer time, meditation, and good deeds. For if Satan’s temptations merely cause you to increase your efforts to grow in holiness, he’ll have an incentive to leave you alone.”
- St. Ignatius of Loyola
(Thanks to Anh for this one)
One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time. – John Piper
Some monks called Euchites, or ‘men of prayer’, once came to Lucius in the ninth region of Alexandria.
He asked them, “What manual work do you do?” They said, “We do not work with out hands. We obey St. Paul’s command and pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17). He said to them, “Don’t you eat?” They said, “Yes, we do.” He said to them: “When you are eating who prays for you?” Then he asked them, “Don’t you sleep?” They said “Yes, we do.” He said, “Who prays for you while you are asleep?” and they could not answer him.
Then he said to them, “I may be wrong, brothers, but it seems to me that you don’t do what you say. I will show you how I pray without ceasing although I work with my hands. With God’s help, I sit down with a few palm leaves, and plait them, and say, “Have mercy upon me, O God, after they great mercy: and according to the multitude of they mercies do away with mine iniquity” (Ps 51:1). He asked them, “Is that prayer, or not” They said, “It’s prayer all right.”
He said, “When I spend all day working and praying in my heart, I make about sixteen pence. Two of these I put outside the door, and with the rest I buy flood. Whoever finds the two pennies outside the door prays for me while I am eating and sleeping: and so by God’s grace I fulfil the text, “Pray without ceasing”.
- De vitis Patrum, Sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V
Yesterday Pope Benedict officially stepped down as Pope. We must continue to pray for him and for his successor…
“I am simply a pilgrim beginning the last leg of his pilgrimage on this earth.” – Pope Benedict XVI
A hermit said, “Chastity is born of tranquility, and silence, and inner prayer”
- De vitis Patrum, Sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V
I meant to post this blog entry a long time ago, but it became one of the many posts to hide itself away in my Drafts folder. I came across it yesterday and, given the recent horrific events in Connecticut, I thought it was an appropriate time to finally post it.
Back in May of 2011, there was a great stir after a parishioner of a parish in Florida requested a Mass to be said for the soul of Osama Bin Laden.
This request caused all kinds of uproar among other parishioners:
“I think it’s totally wrong, he doesn’t belong in the Catholic religion. For what he did to Americans, he doesn’t belong anywhere…”
“It’s unconscionable, it’s sacrilegious…”
While I can understand the gut reaction of those who objected to this proposed Mass intention, how compatible are these statements with the Catholic faith?
I came across a great article a while ago which I thought I would share. Over at Ignitum Today that New Media genius Brandon Vogt has written a wonderful article entitled 6 Ways to Create a Portable Monastery:
Anyone who has seen the inside of my car will know that Brandon is man after my own heart. My Masda’s CD changer is pre-loaded with Christian music, some traditional, some contemporary. My driver’s side door is packed with CDs of unheard talks and my passenger door with those CDs I’ve now listened to and which will now be given away at the next JP2 Group meeting. I also have a rosary hidden in the cup holder compartment in case I need to pray away the anger after being cut up by some other driver! 
For those of you not living in the United States, today is Thanksgiving.
A few days ago, after making a snide remark about the upcoming national holiday, a friend suggested to me that, given that I have a lot to be thankful for, I really shouldn’t be so curmudgeonly about Thanksgiving. My friend was quite right. After all, if the central focus of Catholic worship is “Eucharist” (literally “Thanksgiving”), then perhaps I should be a bit more enthusiastic about a yearly national holiday in which people call to mind all things for which they are thankful….not forgetting, of course, that Squanto was Catholic! Mea culpa.
