Pondering Tidbits of Truth - March 26, 2015

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.

Blessed Alvaro del Portillo

“…contemporary paganism is characterized by the search for- material well-being at any cost; and by the corresponding disregard or, to put it more accurately, fear, genuine terror - of anything that could cause suffering. With this outlook, words such as God, sin, Cross, mortification, eternal life become incomprehensible to a great number of people, who are ignorant of their meaning and content.

You have witnessed the incredible fact that many people began by putting God in parentheses, in some aspects of their professional lives. But then, as God demands, loves, and asks, they end up throwing Him out -like an intruder -from their civil laws and from the lives of their nations. With a ridiculous and presumptuous pride they want to lift up in his place the poor human creature, who has lost his supernatural and human dignity, and has become reduced - it is no exaggeration, one can see it everywhere - to a stomach, sex and money.”

(From Pastoral Letter, December 25, 1985)

Blessed Pope Paul VI

Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the occasions of pleasure, but finds great difficulty in giving birth to happiness. For happiness has is origin elsewhere: it is a spiritual thing. Money, comfort, hygiene, material security, etc. may often not be lacking, but nevertheless, despite these advantages, boredom, suffering and sadness are frequently to be found supervening in the lives of many people.

(Exhortation, Gaudete in Domino, April 9, 1975)

Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

“All, the blood that crimsoned Valley Forge and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, that reddened the soil of France, the Pacific lands and Korea, cries out like Abel's blood for remembrance. Our hearts, knowing that we live because they died, answer their mute pleas by instituting a Memorial Day to recall in prayer and reverence, the sublime truth that ‘greater love than this no man has, that he lay down his life for his friends.’

These youths, however, were not born to die. Soldiering was an interruption to their summons to live; neither they nor their parents willed that their ship of life should be sunk so soon after launching into the sea of life. In this, all men differ, from Our Blessed Lord, Who came into this world to die. Even at His Birth, His Mother was reminded that He came to die, as the Wise Men brought myrrh for His burial. Never before, did any mother see Death wrap its arms so quickly about a newborn Babe. Never before did the shadow of the Cross fall so quickly on a crib.”

(From The Life of Christ)