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.
Jesus to Saint Catherine
of Siena
“I require that you should love Me with the same love with which I love you. This indeed you cannot do, because I love you without being loved. All the love you have for Me you owe to Me, so that it is not of grace that you love Me, but because you ought to do so, while I love you of grace, and not because I owe you My love. Therefore to Me, in person, you cannot repay the love which I require of you, and I have placed you in the midst of your fellows, that you may do to them that which you cannot do to Me, that is to say, that you may love your neighbor of free grace, without expecting any return from him, and what you do to him, I count as done to Me, which My Truth showed forth when He said to Paul, My persecutor - 'Saul, Saul why persecute you Me?' This He said, judging that Paul persecuted Him in His faithful. This love must be sincere, because it is with the same love with which you love Me, that you must love your neighbor.”
(From
The Dialogue)
John Tauler, O.P.
"And because she [our Blessed
Mother] was full of the Holy Ghost, she had known from the prophets that her
Son was to die, and that it was for this that He had taken a mortal body, and
that so it seemed good to His Heavenly Father. Therefore, it was that she knew
not how to desire anything else.
Hence, even as Christ Jesus gladly
offered Himself to the Father as a living Victim for the salvation of men, so
also the most Blessed Virgin Mary offered her own Son for the salvation of the
human race; and it was far more pleasing to her to be deprived of His
consolation, than to hinder man's redemption....But because she understood that
it was God's will that she should suffer together with her Son, she gladly
offered herself for this, for she was ready, indeed, to die with her sweet Son
Jesus, for the salvation and redemption of wretched men. Moreover, she kept
back her sorrow within the secret places of her heart, because she desired no
outward comfort from men, seeking rather to abide in that sorrow until our Lord
Himself delivered her and consoled her."
(From 40 Day Meditations On the
Life and Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ)
Venerable Fulton J. Sheen
“So long as such mercy is available
for all who despair of their own confusion and conflicts and inner
incompleteness, it follows that sin is never the worst thing that can
happen. The worst thing is the refusal to recognize sins. For if we
are sinners, there is a Savior. If there is a Savior, there is a Cross. If
there is a Cross, there is a way of appropriating it to our lives, and our
lives to it. When that is done, despair is driven out and we have the “Peace
which the world cannot give.”
(From Path to Peace)
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Indeed. This got me thinking of the Holy Family. There's a degree of steely determination there that's largely missed in pop religion. As I see it, at any rate.
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