Pondering Tidbits of Truth - May 30, 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.

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.  God our Father is waiting to hear our joys and sorrows, triumphs and failings.  Waiting.  Waiting for our attention in the busyness of life, to pause, to worship, to adore, to praise our merciful God who loves us, provides for us and bestows abundant graces upon us so that we have eternal life with Him.  Can we pause?  Can we listen for the voice of God in the quietness?  Can we give the gift of our attention to God? He is waiting.” 

(From Godhead Here in Hiding  Whom I Do Adore – Lay Dominicans Reflect on Eucharistic Adoration) 

 

Father Donald Haggerty "The idea that contemplation could be at one’s personal disposal and available on demand is an obvious misconception. The only proper expectation is that the soul’s yearning to love God has come from God and cannot be fruitless."

(From The Contemplative Hunger)

 

 

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - May 9, 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.

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 completely to Him, but when we live in Him, we have to take care to employ every possible means to achieve a complete surrender to Him." (From Spiritual Masters)

 

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - March 9, 2023

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 soldiers slap, of the spittle in the Praetorium, and the abandonment of all. All of this sadness was there in that Tabernacle, oppressing and crushing the sweet Heart of Jesus and drawing bitter tears from His eyes. Blessed tears from those eyes! The gaze of Jesus in that Tabernacle was a gaze that pierced the soul, and one can never forget it. I was trying not to cry, so as not to make Jesus even more sad. His gaze expressed the sorrow of One who loves, but who does not find anybody who wants to receive that love.”

 (From The Bishop of the Abandoned Tabernacle)

Father Donald Haggerty

“Truth was nailed to a cross at Calvary in Jesus Christ. And it should be equally evident that the crucifixion of Truth continues throughout the course of history…. What God asks us to accept is that, if we are worthy of it, Christ will be mocked and scourged within our own life, even in trying to love and save souls.”

 (From Conversion: Spiritual Insight Into An Essential Encounter With God) 

 

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - February 23, 2023

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,  one wonders what may have passed through her heart and mind. In her saintly awareness, Jesus Christ on the floor of the Chapel was the same Christ lying sick and abandoned on dirty street corners and alleyways throughout the world. Our love for the Eucharist can only deepen as we receive Him in Mass only to go in search of Him in His concealed presence among the poor. This truth can be a great provocation after a conversion. A rhythm of seeking and finding Him in His Real Presence can extend outside the Mass to many unsuspected moments of the day if we open our eyes differently to the poor - in all the disguises of isolation.” 

(From Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into An Essential Encounter With God)

 

 

Catherine Doherty, Servant of God

“When we are in pain—physical, psychological, spiritual—we lift our pains into the Lord’s cupped hands (the pain of rejection is the hardest). It is like the water that is added to the wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist. The Lord takes our pain, especially the pain of rejection, and He uses it to help others across the whole earth.” 

(From Cross of Rejection)

Monday Musings - Have We Become Too Complacent?

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 Commons)

"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 intrudes into other lives, the crucifixion itself as the central event in history is obscured. Callousness toward the one is an indifference to the other."

(Father Donald Haggerty from Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into an Essential Encounter with God)

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - February 9, 2023

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 speak it, mirth and song to think it. If thou thinks (on) JESUS continually, and holds it firmly, it purges your sin, and kindles your heart; it clarifies your soul, it removes anger and does away slowness. It wounds in love and fulfills charity. It chases the devil and puts out dread. It opens heaven and makes a contemplative man. Have JESUS in mind, for that puts all vices and phantoms out from the lover.”

(From The Form Of Perfect Living And Other Prose Treatises)

 

Father Donald Haggerty

“The priests who will not go a day without an hour in silence before a tabernacle seem always to be the vibrant, faithful priests carrying a love for souls in their own souls.”

(From Conversion: Spiritual Insights into an Essential Encounter With God)

 

 

Eucharistic Reflection - Be Sensitive To These Signs of The Time

(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 Eucharist. The phenomenon is a symptom of the privatization of faith in our time.

Relations with God, including the reception the Eucharist, have become for many people a matter of private determination, without reference to a wider body of shared Catholic discipline and belief. The likely prevalence of sacrilegious Communion, with perhaps no comparable precedent in history, surely contributes in turn to a slow bleeding within the Body of the Church during the current era. The uncertain, vague sense of the Eucharist is aligned inevitably with a reduced awareness of the person of Jesus Christ as true God and man.

A soul recently converted and drawn to the Eucharist will be sensitive to these signs of the times.”

(From Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into An Essential Encounter with God by Father Donald Haggerty)

Monday Musings - Let Us Be Real About Eucharistic Revival

(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 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 Eucharist. The phenomenon is a symptom of the privatization of faith in our time.

Relations with God, including the reception the Eucharist, have become for many people a matter of private determination, without reference to a wider body of shared Catholic discipline and belief. The likely prevalence of sacrilegious Communion, with perhaps no comparable precedent in history, surely contributes in turn to a slow bleeding within the Body of the Church during the current era. The uncertain, vague sense of the Eucharist is aligned inevitably with a reduced awareness of the person of Jesus Christ as true God and man.

A soul recently converted and drawn to the Eucharist will be sensitive to these signs of the times.”

(From Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into An Essential Encounter with God by Father Donald Haggerty)

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - December 29, 2022

 

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, may not help you in the evening. What helps me might not help you. Remember the famous words of Dom John Chapman, ‘Pray as you can and not as you can't.’ The acid test is does this means of prayer help me to keep trying to raise my heart and mind to God?”

(From The Primacy of Loving the Spirituality of the Heart)

 

Venerable Fulton J. Sheen   “The man who thinks only of himself says only prayers of petition; he who thinks of his neighbor says prayers of intercession; he who thinks only of loving and serving God, says prayers of abandonment to God’s will, and this is the prayer of the saints.”

(From Go to Heaven)

 

Father Donald Haggerty

"Work for God is too easily considered by a standard of achievement in the world. But there are no real successes in any spiritual work that are equivalent to an accomplishment in the world. Certain patterns, however, begin to show after a time. A work desired by God seems always to include some measure of frustration and failed exertion. At the same time, failure in a work undertaken for God often conceals fruits whose delay in manifesting themselves is only temporary. It is hard to accept these patterns until they are observed over a certain length of time in our lives. Nothing significant is ever done for God and for souls without some taste of crucifixion and the offering it requires from us."

(From The Contemplative Hunger)