Harvesting The Fruits of Contemplation

“Our attraction for the tabernacle is a gift for which we cannot be sufficiently grateful…The mystery of that attraction is never an easy comprehension. We simply know it and treasure it in an utterly personal manner. Our eyes gravitate in the direction of the tabernacle when all is quiet because someone is there in that location even as he is silent…We sense in an utterly Catholic manner that this blessed location of the tabernacle is the secret hiding place for the sacred presence that it encloses. He summons us to himself there and we find in a lifetime of prayers before the Blessed Sacrament his ever-penetrating gaze." (Father Donald Haggerty from Conversion: Spiritual Insights into an Essential Encounter with God )

(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons ) "People who receive Holy Communion at an occasional Mass attended during the year, on Christmas Day, for instance, or at a wedding or funeral, are not so unusual. They seem to take Holy Communion with no thought they are receiving anything other than a wafer of bread as part of a ritual that everyone present at Mass does. It is likely that in many cases they have no faith in the reality of the Eucharist as the Body of Christ; nothing prompts them to fear making a grave act of disrespect toward the sacred. They simply join the Communion line and take the Host as a participant in the ceremony, as it were, thinking nothing of it. Not uncommonly, they reach out a single hand to take hold of the sacred Host as though they were being given a religious souvenir. In all this casual indifference to the sacred reality, the wounds to the heart of Jesus must be real, and perhaps quite terrible. The callousness of an unbelieving touch in this manner when in t...

Over the years, I have been instructed and blessed by the work of Father Donald Haggerty. His recent book, The Hour of Testing - Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Tome of Ecclesial Uncertainty , is a book for our time. I highly recommend it. Just ponder this little this gem: “[God] comes as one who can be refused and denied admittance; His tapping at the door of the human heart can be ignored. Indeed, He is a God who can be cast outside into the cold. There are countless people who at some point in life callously occupy the home in their soul that belongs to God and evict Him.  He is a God of unfathomable humility, submitting repeatedly to crass gestures of rudeness from His creature. Until we realize this humility of God, we cannot love Him properly. He is vulnerable to being wounded and finds few people who are moved to see how, in His humility, He turns His face away, hiding it from view, not in anger, but to conceal the rejection He experiences from those indifferent to Him. It ...

 

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. St. Catherine of Genoa    "The greatest suffering of the souls in purgatory, it seems to me, is the awareness that something in them displeases God, that they have deliberately gone against His great goodness. I can also see that the divine essence is so pure and light-filled—much more than we can imagine—that the soul that has but the slightest imperfection would rather throw itself into a thousand hells than appear thus before the divine presence."   (From  Treatise on Purgatory )   Dr. Kathleen Cuddihy, O.P. “Our Lord is here in all His Divinity and Humility in the Holy Eucharist, waiting for us to come.  To come, to spend time with Him in Adoration, to receive Him into our bodies during Mass, to unite with Him.  Our ever loving, merciful Father is present with us, we can look upon Him, speak to Him.  G...

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. Archbishop Luis M. Martinez, Servant of God "As an audience maintains silence to hear better the voice of an orator, as music lovers keep silence during a symphony to admire its artistic beauty, so the silence of contemplation is nothing other than the indispensable condition for hearing the voice of God and addressing to Him our heartfelt words." (From When God is Silent: Finding Spiritual Peace Amidst The Storms of Life )   Father Donald Haggerty "To give ourselves to God in prayer is to find a door in our heart unlocking and opening to the hearts of other people." (From his Contemplative Enigmas )   St. Jean-Pierre de Caussade "Sometimes we live in God and sometimes God lives in us. These are very different states. When God lives in us, we should abandon ourselves com...

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.       Ven. Fulton J. Sheen "For meditation the ear of the soul is more important than the tongue: St. Paul tells us that faith comes from listening. Most people commit the same mistake with God that they do with their friends: they do all the talking."   (From Go To Heaven)     St. Manuel Gonzalez Garcia “My faith was looking at Jesus through the door of that Tabernacle, so silent, so patient, so good, gazing right back at me…His gaze was telling me much and asking me for more. It was a gaze in which all the sadness of the Gospels was reflected; the sadness of ‘no room in the inn’; the sadness of those words, ‘Do you also want to leave Me?”; the sadness of poor Lazarus begging for crumbs from the rich man's table; the sadness of the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, of the...

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.   Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen   “If you have never before prayed to Mary, do so now. Can you not see that if Christ himself willed to be physically formed in her for nine months and then be spiritually formed by her for thirty years, it is to her that we must go to learn how to have Christ formed in us? Only she who raised Christ can raise a Christian.”   (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross )   Father Donald Haggerty “Many times in her life Mother Teresa repeated that the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist was inseparable from His presence concealed in the poor. The presence is  one presence, she constantly affirmed. The same Jesus who hides in the Sacrament is disguised in the distressing appearance of the poor man. As she prayed on her knees before that Host in Kolkata, ...

It is so easy to deceive and delude ourselves into thinking that we have been progressing in our spiritual lives. Thank God, someone like Father  Donald Haggerty comes along and forces us to open our eyes and take a closer look: (Image Source:  Wikimedia Common s) "If Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord and God, gave Himself to the death described in the Gospels, how is it that a disquiet does not register somewhere in the peaceful soul of someone who kneels head bowed before a crucifix after receiving Holy Communion at a Saturday evening vigil Mass and follows his act of piety in the next hour by an expensive meal, while a diseased child in sub-Sahara Africa sleeps restlessly in the long hours of this same night after finding nothing on a plate at dinner but the dust of a windswept desert?... It may be that there is a direct correlation between the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the presence of the poor in any age. When the poor are ignored, when little thought of their sufferings i...

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. John Cardinal O’Connor “I believe that suffering is of the essence of the priesthood. The priest is preeminently a man of sacrifice...It has always impressed me that even His risen body was scarred with the wounds of the crucifixion. I cannot imagine an unscarred priest, a priest without wounds, because I cannot imagine an unscared Christ.” (From his September 8, 1989 Pastoral letter on the priesthood, titled,  Always a Priest, Always Present ) Richard Rolle   “If you will be well with GOD, and have grace to rule your life, and come to the joy of love: this name JESUS, fasten it so fast in your heart that it come never out of your thought. And when you speak to Him, and through custom say, JESUS, it shall be in Your ear, joy; in Your mouth, honey; and in Your heart, melody: for men shall think joy to hear that name be named, sweetness to ...

(Photo by  Josh Applegate  on  Unsplash ) “When we realize after a serious conversion the true holiness of the Eucharist, the presence of God Himself in the Host, there is bound to be a spiritual discomfort and unease in seeing at times the dishonor accorded the sacredness of the Mass. Fervent prayer at Mass can be an arduous task when challenged by casual priestly gestures, slapdash improvisations, banal comments. With the rapid words and quick movements of some priests, it can be difficult to realize that an enormous event takes place with every consecration at Mass. The external displays are often hard to distinguish from an indifference to the transcendent mystery. The clerical disregard for the sacredness of the Mass, moreover, cannot be unlinked with the diminished faith in the real presence of the Eucharist among many Catholics. The almost universal reception of Holy Communion at weekend Masses raises precisely a question of real belief in the truth of the Euchar...

(Image Source Unsplash.com ) How can we expect the current efforts toward Eucharistic Revival to bear fruit when we have not addressed the real and obvious reasons why so few Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament?  Over the next several weeks, God willing, I will highlight those reasons, one by one. These issues have been raised for decades and have been ignored. Those who raise them are dismissed and cast aside as if they were lepers. Let's begin by pondering these words written by Father Donald Haggerty more than five years ago. How are our Bishops and the current Revival efforts addressing the concerns Father [and countless other souls] have raised?  "When we realize after a serious conversion the true holiness of the Eucharist, the presence of God Himself in the Host, there is bound to be a spiritual discomfort and unease in seeing at times the dishonor accorded the sacredness of the Mass. Fervent prayer at Mass can be an arduous ta...

  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.       David Torkington  “ ‘Prayer’, he [Cardinal Hume] said, ‘is trying to raise the heart and mind to God.’… The quality of our prayer is ultimately determined by the quality of our endeavor. It was for this reason that the great Mystic and mother Saint Angela of Foligno said that prayer is the School of Divine Love. In other words, it is the place where we learn how to love God by trying daily to raise our hearts and minds to him. I intend to introduce you to the different means and methods that tradition is given us to help us keep trying to turn and open our minds and hearts to God in this book but first let me say this. There are no perfect means to help us keep trying to raise the heart and mind to God, just different means. What helps you at the beginning, may not help you later. What helps you in the morning...