Harvesting The Fruits of Contemplation

On this memorial of the Angelic Doctor, let me re-share a short post I wrote 4 years ago: (Image Source: Wikimedia Commons) I read St. Thomas Aquinas by G.K. Chesterton. I highly recommend this book! Although I do not know if the following tale Chesterton shares about our Angelic Doctor is true, I just had to share it with you: "It was of him [St.Thomas Aquinas] that the tale was told, and would certainly have been told more widely among us if it had been told of a Puritan, that the Pope pointed to his gorgeous Papal Palace and said, "Peter can no longer say 'Silver and gold have I none;' " and the Spanish friar an­swered, "No, and neither can he now say, 'Rise and walk'." St. Thomas Aquinas pray for us.

Thank you Allison Gingras at  Reconciled To You   and Elizabeth Riordan at  Theology Is A Verb   for  hosting Catholic bloggers at  Worth   Revisiting .    It is a privilege for us to share our work with you and your readers .  Stop by for a visit now .   Monday Musings - Which Kind of Soul Am I? - Part 2  (Originally posted October 16, 2017) (Image source:  Wikimedia Commons ) [In T he Golden Key to Heaven  –  An Explanation of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, St.   Anthony Mary Claret discusses three distinct types of souls. Last week we looked at the first type (you can review that post here ).  If you did not recognize yourself then, maybe what follows will be a more accurate description. This one might really smart - the Truth does that you know.] "The second class of men consists of those who have a true will to aspire to perfection, but it is not ...

St. Catherine of Siena reminds us that it is not enough to be "a good person" or a "spiritual person". We must be "trees of love" free from deadly sin: (Image source: Wikimedia Commons ) “All of you are trees of love: You cannot live without love because I made you for love. The soul who lives virtuously sets her tree's root in the valley of true humility. But those who live wickedly have set their root in the mountain of pride, and because it is badly planted it produces fruit not of life but of death. Their fruits are their actions, and they are all poisoned by a multitude of different sins. If they do produce one or another fruit of good action, it is spoiled because the root from which it comes is rotten. In other words, if a soul is living in deadly sin, no good that she does has any value for eternal life because it is not done in grace.”