"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
One of the hermits said, “… Adam, even though he was in Paradise, disobeyed God’s command while Job, who was living on a dung hill, kept it. It seems that God requires from us a good intention, that is, that we should fear him always”
– De vitis Patrum, Sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V
When Isaac of Thebaid visited a community, he saw that one of the brothers was sinful, and passed sentence on him.
But when he was returning to his cell in the desert, the angel of the Lord came and stood in front of the door of his cell, and said, “I will not let you go in.” He asked, “Why not?” The angel of the Lord replied, “God sent me to ask you, ‘Where do you tell me to send that sinful brother whom you sentenced?'”
At once Isaac repented, saying, “I have sinned, forgive me.” The angel said, “Get up, God has forgiven you. In future take care to judge no man before God has judged him.”
– De vitis Patrum, Sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V
Last month I wrote a post talking about the large number of my friends who got engaged or married in December. In the article I asked my married friends to write in the Comments, giving their advice for my newly-engaged and newly-married friends.
Many thanks to all of you who responded to my request and shared with us lessons learned. Here are some my favourite quotations…
The Second Reading at Mass today is one of those better known Scripture passages, St. Paul’s praise of the virtue of love, found in his First Letter to the Corinthians.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, …“. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to quote the rest of this passage as you will have certainly heard it at…every…single…wedding…you have ever attended 😉
It is my guess that St. Paul’s great hymn of love was the inspiration for a section of an epistle written by St. Clement of Rome at the end of the First Century. A few decades after St. Paul’s death, St. Clement wrote a letter to that same troublesome Corinthian congregation to address that community’s latest round of problems. Some young whipper-snappers had usurped control of the church and deposed their clergy. The Bishop of Rome wrote to them, urging the members of the church to obedience and to brotherly love.
Every now and then we need to put things into perspective. This is one of those videos which does just that.
A few weeks ago I recorded the Second Vatican Counsel document which concerns the Eastern Rite Churches, Orientalium Ecclesiarum. This weekend I completed recording Pope Benedict’s first encyclical God Is Love (“Deus Caritas Est”) onto MP3.
Introduction (Download)
Part I (Download)
Part II (Download)