Pondering Tidbits of Truth - January 27, 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.

 

 

Johann Tauler, O.P.

"Priests, on account of their dignity, have a right to more honor and respect. They represent the sovereign Priest, Jesus Christ; you owe them therefore a very profound respect. They may be good to you and treat you with condescension, but never let a layman dare to make himself the equal of a priest and treat him with familiarity. Never consider them as your comrades, but as your superiors. Remain in your place; and if one of them wants to condescend to your level, do not take advantage of it in any other way than to put yourselves still lower."

(From Spiritual Conferences) 

 

 St. Peter Julian Eymard

"Since Jesus Christ has loved me, I will love Him in spite of everything and nothing will ever prevent me from loving Him! The events of the time, the spiritual forces, hunger, nakedness, the sword or death, no, nothing will separate me from the love of Jesus Christ, by Whom we triumph over everything: 'Who can be our adversary, if God is on our side'."

(From The Eucharist and Christian Perfection II)  

 

 

Father Federico Suarez

"If there are so many Christians who today live aimlessly with little depth, and hemmed in on all sides by narrow horizons, it is due, above all, to their lack of any clear idea of why they, personally, exist...What elevates a man and truly gives him a personality of his own is the consciousness of his vocation, the consciousness of his own specific task in the universe."

(From Mary of Nazareth)

Pondering Tidbits Of Truth - December 30, 2021

 

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.

 

 

 

Johann Tauler, O.P.

“There was once someone who loved our Lord very dearly and to him our Lord offered His divine kiss. But this soul said: ‘No, truly, dear Lord, this is not what I want at all. If I were to be taken out of myself in rapture, I could not be of anymore use to You. How could I then pray for all Your poor souls to help them out of purgatory? How could I pray for miserable sinners?’ It is up to us who are still on earth to help sinners and the souls who cannot help themselves. God cannot do anything for them without our help, because His justice must be perfectly satisfied. So those who love Him and are still on earth must constantly labor for this. Could anyone ask for a greater love of God than that man showed, depriving himself from divine favors from this motive?”

(From Spiritual Conferences)

 

Father Francis Fernandez

“During the years of His public life our Lord had little to say about the political and social situation of His people, and this in spite of their oppression by the Romans. On different occasions he makes it clear that He does not want to be a political Messiah nor a liberator from the yoke of Rome. He came to give us the freedom of the sons of God: freedom from the sins we had committed, which had reduced us to a state of slavery. He came to give us freedom from eternal death, another consequence of sin; freedom from the dominion of the devil, since man could now overcome sin with the help of grace. And finally, He gave us freedom from life according to the flesh, which is opposed to supernatural life: The freedom brought by Christ through the Holy Spirit has restored to us the capacity, of which sin had deprived us. of loving God above all and of remaining in contact with Him…

The Church’s concern for social problems derives from her spiritual mission and is kept within the limits of that mission. The Church, of her very nature, does not fulfill her purpose in solving temporal problems. She follows Christ when He declared that His Kingdom was not of this world, and absolutely refused to be considered a judge or promoter of justice in purely human affairs.”

(From In Conversation With God (1:35.1)

 

Mother Mary Francis, PCC

“There is, among more people all the time, a sense of the horror of the waste of food, of the waste of life. But the common denominator of all this wastefulness is the waste of grace. Our Lady is the only one who in her complete sinlessness never wasted grace. This, I believe, should be our goal this Advent: that we will not waste grace.”

(From Come Lord Jesus)

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - November 18, 2021

 

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.

 

 

 

Father Thomas Dubay, S.M.

“There is a great gap for most people between prayer and performance. At our devotions we can say sublime things about loving God with our whole heart, and then ten minutes later divide that heart with selfish overeating—or any one of a dozen other petty clingings.”

(From Deep Conversion Deep Prayer)

 

 

Johann Tauler, O.P.

“Our wretched nature is so possessive and so utterly self-centered that it creeps in everywhere to arrogate to itself what does not belong to it. It spoils and sullies the gifts of God and hinders Him in His noble work. Our nature is completely permeated with the poison of original sin, with the result that it seeks its own satisfaction in everything. St. Thomas says that on account of this same poison, man loves himself more than God, or His angels, or anything else that God ever created. Not that God made our nature like this; it has become corrupt and disfigured by turning away from God.”

 

(From Spiritual Conferences)

 

 

St. Paul of the Cross

"Let all creation help you to praise God. Give yourself the rest you need. When you are walking alone, listen to the sermon preached to you by the flowers, the trees, the shrubs, the sky, the sun and the whole world. Notice how they preach to you a sermon full of love, of praise of God, and how they invite you to proclaim the greatness of the one who has given them being."

(From Flowers of the Passion)

 

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - November 4, 2021

 

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.

 

 

 Johann Tauler, O.P.

"Be sure of this: there is no creature ever made by God who can set you free or help you; only God can do it. Run about as you will, search high and low the whole world over, you will never find the help you need anywhere except in God. If the Lord chooses to use an instrument, man or angel, to achieve this, He can; but He must do it and no one else."

(From Spiritual Conferences)

Rev. M. Raymond, O.C.S.O.

"Today is a day of ultimates and of clear-cut choices. For the lines are sharply drawn. Either we stand with Mary beneath the cross, or we stand with the shouting rabble about the cross. We find ourselves either as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, or are found to be members of the mystical body of antichrist. We become totalitarian Christians and give our all to God, or we become totalitarian anti-christians and have our all taken by the State. Pius XI stated absolutely that 'in this conflict there is really a question of the fundamental problem of the universe and of the most important decision proposed to man's free will: For God or against God...there is no middle ground, no island on which we can stand, no fence we can straddle. It is Christ or it is antichrist'."

(From God, A Woman and The Way)

 

Kevin Vost, Psy.D.

"What is the deadliest sin in the world? St. Thomas, following St. Gregory the Great, argued that one sin was in a sense the deadliest of all, more prone to generate other sins, more directly opposed to the goodness of God than even the capital seven. All of the deadly sins have this sin in common, if not as their direct cause, then as an indirect consequence. The sin that has pride of place is the sin of pride itself." 

(From The Seven Deadly Sins - A Thomistic Guide to Vanquishing Vice and Sin)