Pondering Tidbits of Truth - March 21, 2024

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)