Harvesting The Fruits of Contemplation

How our loving Lord thirsts for our love, our visits, our hearts, minds and souls!  Please satiate His thirst!

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  "We appreciate the flavor of some fruit much more when we taste it than when we read a description of it in a botany book. What description comes near the actual taste we get when we bite into fruit? So too, when we are united to God and savor Him by personal experience we know divine things better than when we read things written by learned men." (From True Devotion to the Holy Spirit )

Thanks to Father Z for sharing this . .

It should be no surprise, after decades of being told it is unlikely that any of us have committed a mortal sin and that we are "good people" whom a loving and merciful God would never send to hell, that we have lost the sense of sin, a healthy fear of hell, a concern for the salvation of souls, and a recognition of our need to seek Sacramental forgiveness. How refreshing then that our Holy Father is beckoning the members of Christ's Church to discard these untruths, to humble themselves and to be reconciled and transformed by the healing graces of that great and undeserved Sacrament. In doing so, Pope Francis is extending the same invitation offered by many of his predecessors.  No doubt his invitation echoes the wisdom of Pope Paul VI: Let's us pray that all who profess to be Catholic will heed the invitation of Christ's Vicar on earth and will go to confession, not only during the "Day of Reconciliation" he has annou...

(Source: Wikimedia Commons ) 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. Rev. Daniel Considine S.J. “There is more danger of our not hoping enough than of our hoping too much. Don’t put your standard so low. If you want to go high, the higher the things you think God wants of you, the better. Breathe the air of God’s promises, and raise your hearts high. God wants a great deal of us. You have never hitherto believed that He really does. You say to yourself, if God wanted me to be a saint, He should have given me a very different character. Whether you are a Carmelite or living in the world, there is not the smallest difference in the love God wants of you. Hitherto I have not realized what God wants of me. The highest gifts of prayer, what are they compared with the gift of His Body and Blood!

(Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center) 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.     Pope Francis “I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”    (Interview by Antonio Spadaro, SJ)

Have not yet seen the following excerpt get much play or discussion. Have you? From the recent interview of our Holy Father, we learn that, he, like his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, makes a holy hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament every evening. Certainly, if our Holy Father makes Eucharistic Adoration a priority of his daily life, we, if we really wanted to, can and should find one hour each week to do likewise. Why the on-going reluctance to promote this most vital devotion - one that Our Lord Himself has asked us to do?

  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. Pope Francis Paul is a nuisance; he is a man, who with his preaching, his work, his attitude, irritates others, because testifying to Jesus Christ and the proclamation of Jesus Christ makes us uncomfortable, it threatens our comfort zones – even Christian comfort zones, right? It irritates us. The Lord always wants us to move forward, forward, forward – not to take refuge in a quiet life, or in cozy structures, no? And Paul, in preaching of the Lord, was a nuisance. But he had deep within him that most Christian of attitudes: Apostolic zeal.”  (Homily – May 16, 2013)   St. Thomas Aquinas “Man needs to know two things: the glory of God and the punishment of Hell. For through being drawn by His glory and terrified by His punishments, men are careful on their own account and refrain from sin.”   ( The Trea...

Thank you Holy Father Francis for calling the entire world to adore our Lord! So many ignore His invitation to do so. Let us run to kneel before Him, not just on Corpus Christi but as often as we can. I could not pass up sharing this photograph and article from Crisis Magazine :

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. Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman   “The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extreme agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost,  but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.”   (From   Apologia Pro Vita Sua )   Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val “Have a great devotion to the Passion of Our Lord. With peace and resignation, put up with your daily troubles and worries. Remember that you are not a disciple of Christ unless you partake of His sufferings and are associated with His Passion. The help of the grace of silence was the only thing ...

Here are two impressions of our Holy Father. Thanks to  Aggie Catholics  and   The Telegraph  for the first video: This second video is from the St. Joseph Province of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans)