Why would God want to take on human flesh?
"There is a marvelous story told about a four-year-old child who awoke one night frightened, convinced that in the darkness around her there were all kinds of spooks and monsters. Alone, she ran to her parents' bedroom. Her mother calmed her down and, taking her by the hand, led her back to her own room, where she put on a light and reassured the child with these words: 'You needn't be afraid, you are not alone here. God is in the room with you.' The child replied: 'I know that God is here, but I need someone in this room who has some skin!' "
To Practice: Be an incarnation of God's loving and comforting presence for those around you during this holy season.
Why go to church?
"Heaven, the scriptures assure us, will be enjoyed within the communal embrace of billions of persons of every temperament, race, background, and ideology imaginable. A universal heart will be required to live there. Thus, in this life, it is good to get some practice at this, good to be constantly in situations that painfully stretch the heart. Few things — and we certainly all admit this — stretch the heart as painfully as does church community. Conversely, when we avoid the pain and mess of ecclesial encounter to walk a less painful private road or to gather with only persons of our own kind, the heart need not and generally does not stretch. Going to church is one of the better cardiovascular spiritual exercises available."
To Practice: Stretch your heart by participating regularly in the life of a congregation.
- From Ronald Rolheiser “The Holy Belonging”
Read a full review of this book
“Do not deceive yourself with idle hopes that in the world to come you will find life, if you have not tried to find it in the present world.” Theophanis the Monk.
Man was made for Joy and Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the world we safely go
Joy and Woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy of silken twine
- William Blake
He had strong competition from Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher, but POPE JOHN PAUL II has been voted the most influential European of the last 25 years. Financial Times readers who cast 40,000 votes in the paper’s on-line poll – conducted to mark the 25th anniversary of it European edition – obviously saw the end of the Soviet Empire and communism as he most significant event of the last quarter of the 20th century: The Pope, Gorbachev and Thatcher all played a part in that process. (London Tablet 3 April 2004)
Like weary waves,
Thought flows upon thought,
But the still depth beneath
Is all thine own.
(George Macdonald)
“The use of Alleluia dates back to the earliest liturgical formularies, both Jewish and Christian, as an endless chant of joy. In the Christian community it was an expression of praise and a foretaste of eternal gladness. “We are an Easter people”, Augustine wrote, “and Alleluia is our song.” Joan Chittister In a High Spiritual Season.
The meaning of life cannot be drawn from the clouds or from opinion; it is nourished by a confidence. God sends his confidence like a breath of the spirit falling upon every human being,
One of the irreplaceable marks of the Gospel is that God invites a human being to place his confidence in return in a Man who has come out of the grave and is alive. Faith in not an opinion, it is an attitude: the believer welcomes the Risen Lord and he too becomes alive, not half-dead. Already in the early days of the Church, Irenaeus of Lyons, a Christian of the third generation after Christ – he had known Polycarp who had himself been a disciple of John the Evangelist – wrote: “the glory of God is a human person fully alive. The life of a human being is the vision of God.
Praise to the Risen Christ who, knowing how poor and vulnerable we are, comes and prays in us the hymn of unchanging confidence. (Brother Roger of Taize.)
From "I Sought and I Found - My experience of God and the Church" Carlo Carretto
'Let us see in the gospel how things are when the Spirit of the Lord hovers near.
Would you like to see three earnest confessions?
Here is the first. It is Peter's, as he stands naked before God on the lake shore: "Leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man" (Luke 5:8) And round him stood the tiny Church, coming into existence.
Another serious confession, another earnest confession, is that of Zacchaeus, right in the middle of a crowd, and not a crowd of friends either: "Look, sir, I am going to give half my property to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody I will pay him back four times the amount." (Luke 19:8)
But the most beautiful and dramatic confession we have is the one on Calvary, from someone who was a worse thief than Zacchaeus.
Luke report it to us in these words: "We deserve it, after all," says the thief, hanging there crucified like him. "We are only paying the price for what we've done, but this man has done nothing wrong." Then he turns to Jesus, and adds, full of hope, "Jesus remember me, when you come into your kingdom." (cf Luke 23:41-42)
And Jesus' full remission of all his sins is the fitting crown of this, the most worthy confession any dying man could make.
It is hard to confess our sins. It is certainly harder than receiving Communion or the Sacrament of the Sick.
But it is important, and it is especially important to make our confession earnestly.
I must tell you, humbly, that I went to confession each week, as was the practice in my time, especially in the religious life.
But I have to add that I did not enter the confessional each week, without having worked out in advance the trick, the words, to deliver my conscience from my sins but in such a way that the confessor would learn as little as possible.
And dare I mention the confessions I made to show what a fine boy I was? Poor me!............................
And since we are dealing with something hard here, something very hard, give us a hand, by setting us an example.
Why should the servant confess and not the employer?
Why should the pupil confess and not the teacher?
Why should the child and not the parent?
Why the parishioner and not the Pastor?
Why the last sinner of God's people and not the first?
How wonderful it was for me to hear Pope John beg forgiveness of the 'Jews for the suffering inflicted on them by Christians! How fine a thing it was to hear Pope Paul state that Galileo's trial had been unjust! And when Pope John Paul confessed in Spain, in the name of the Church, the sins committed by the Spanish Inquisition!
These are confessions that do good, that free consciences, that help people understand people, that bind us more closely to our churches - and in the end - help us discover what we seek: God himself.
That is something I have never understood better than in the moment of reconciliation: who God is.'
Book Review of "Why I am A Catholic" - author Garry Wills - Reviewer Andrew Hamilton
The founding stone of Will's faith is the founding stone of the church itself: Peter, the first Christian leader, the weak, clumsy, vacillating liar chosen as the first shepherd of Jesus flock. Some Catholics have viewed the famous passage in Matthew ('s gospel) in which Jesus vests authority in Peter as the rock on which his church will be built, as the beginning of a singular and unquestionable papal authority, stretching seamlessly from the first pope to the current one. Wills begs to differ. And he quotes St Augustine to show how:
"When Peter was told 'I will give you the keys of heaven's kingdom, and what you tie on earth will have been tied in heaven, what you untie on earth will have been untied in heaven' he was standing for the entire church, which does not collapse though it is beaten in this world, by every kind of trial, as if by rain, flood, tempest. It is founded on a Stone (Petra), from which Peter took his name Stone-Founded (Petrus); for the Stone did not take its name from the Stone-founded, but the Stone-founded from the Stone - as Christ does not take his name from Christians, but Christians from Christ ... because the Stone was Christ.
This isn't mere wordplay. It's critical. The pope is not the stone, just as the church is not the pope. The founding stone is Christ, of which Peter is a mere unifying servant. The papacy is a critical symbol of the unity of the church, but it is not the source of actual, unimpeachable authority. It is an institution of inclusion, not dictatorship. Because the papacy is such a human entity, it also errs. This is not an exception to the rule of the papacy; it is the rule itself. And when you think of the sometimes sordid, sometimes inspired and sometimes downright murderous history of the papacy, you see how that must be. We are obliged as Catholics to differ from the pope in many ways and at many times in history - since he is merely the human symbol of the church's call to shepherd Christ's flock, and he will sin and lose his way as Peter did. But the church prevails because the papacy is not the church; it is not even the stone. But it is "Stone-Founded".