Why do we dwell within our protective shells, safe from what might harm us but certainly not fully open to what lies beyond?
The Good Word
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St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s lesson for prayer: Don’t worry if God feels distant.
If you feel a longing for God, take heart. You are alert and ready to receive the bridegroom. If you were not, his absence would not burn.
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Don’t be jealous of holiness. Imitate it instead.
We are not meant to envy the intimacy or intensity of religious life. We are called to imitate it.
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Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee and the theological virtue of hope
This is the theological virtue we call hope: remaining open to what will come, to whatever God determines. And what that might be, we truly do not know, no matter how certain we might think that we are.
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Let yourself be interrupted by God
So often what we consider to be interruptions can become invitations. We only need to ask, “What is it that you are saying, dear Lord?”
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When it comes to abortion, are Catholics imposing their religion on others?
Believers who oppose abortion are not doing so by divine dictate. On the contrary, though our ethical thought is certainly inspired by our religious faith, it is not directly derived from it.
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Jesus didn’t come to preach about heaven and hell
Our eschatology became focused upon place rather than person, but that is a fundamental distortion of the Gospel preached by the disciples.
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A farmer’s lesson: Following Jesus takes time
A life lived in the Gospel makes demands upon us. If it does not, we need to look again. Maybe we are not living such a life.
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The feast of Corpus Christi comes out of medieval spirituality. But it is not a relic of the past.
With Vatican II and the return of the sacred liturgy to the faithful, Corpus Christi seemed to become a relic of an earlier, deprived spirituality. But the church tends to rearrange her treasures rather than abandon them.
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Prince Charles will succeed his mother. Christ will not succeed his Father.
Even with the clarity of later church teaching, we still struggle to avoid a multitude of misleading notions about the Most Holy Trinity. One such misconception comes from the ancient institution we call monarchy.