Pondering Tidbits of Truth - Feburary 6, 2014

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Pondering Tidbits of Truth is my simple and inadequate way of providing nuggets of spiritual wisdom for you to chew on from time to time.

Rev. Daniel Considine S.J.

“There is more danger of our not hoping enough than of our hoping too much. Don’t put your standard so low. If you want to go high, the higher the things you think God wants of you, the better. Breathe the air of God’s promises, and raise your hearts high.

God wants a great deal of us. You have never hitherto believed that He really does. You say to yourself, if God wanted me to be a saint, He should have given me a very different character. Whether you are a Carmelite or living in the world, there is not the smallest difference in the love God wants of you. Hitherto I have not realized what God wants of me. The highest gifts of prayer, what are they compared with the gift of His Body and Blood!

When He asks us to look up and see His face, we look down. When He wants us to walk forward, we will shut our ears to His invitation. Difficulties will vanish at once if we can only bring ourselves to believe that God loves us so. Unconquerable Hope in spite of apparent difficulty. Don’t let your heart sink with the false feeing that ‘somehow God doesn’t care specially for me.’ The saints combined humility with the unshaken belief in God’s great love for them.”

(From More Words of Encouragement)

Pope Francis

“Jesus produces amazement among those who hear His words and behold His deeds. This capacity to cause astonishment comes from Who He is: the one to Whom all power in heaven and on earth has been given (Matt 28:18).”

(From Open Mind, Faithful Heart)

St. Alphonsus de Liguori

“Miserable had we been if Jesus Christ had not died for us! We should all have been imprisoned in hell. For us who have deserved hell, it is a great motive to us to love Jesus Christ, to think, that by His death, He has delivered us from this hell, by pouring forth His blood.

Let us, then, in passing, glance at the pains of hell, where at this hour are so many, wretched souls. Oh, miserable beings! there they are sunk in a sea of fire where they endure ceaseless agony, since in this fire they experience pains of all kinds. There they are given into the hands of devils, who, full of fury, are busied only tormenting these miserable condemned ones. There, still more than by the fire and the other tortures, are they tormented by remorse of conscience in recollecting the sins of their life, which were the cause of their damnation. There they see the way of escape from this abyss of torments ever closed. There they find themselves forever excluded from the company of the saints, and from their country, heaven, for which they were created. But what most afflicts them, and constitutes their hell, is to see themselves abandoned by God, and condemned       to be unable evermore to love Him, and to look at themselves with hatred and madness.

From this hell Jesus Christ has delivered us, redeeming us not with gold or any earthly good thing, but giving His own life and blood upon the cross. The kings of the earth send their subjects to die in war to preserve their own security; Jesus Christ chose Himself to die, in order to give safety to His creatures.”

(From The Passion and the Death of Jesus Christ)