Eucharistic Reflection - If We Really Loved God

"If we really loved the good God, we should make it our joy and happiness to come and spend a few moments to adore Him, and ask Him for the grace of forgiveness; and we should regard those moments as the happiest of our lives."

 (Saint John Vianney)

Eucharistic Reflection - Without Him

"Without the Holy Eucharist there would be no happiness in this world; life would be insupportable. When we receive Holy  Communion, we receive our joy and our happiness. The good God, wishing to give Himself to us in the Sacrament of His Love, gave us a vast and great desire, which He alone can satisfy. 

 

In the presence of this beautiful Sacrament, we are like a person dying of thirst by the side of a river — he would only need to bend his head; like a person still remaining poor, close to a great treasure — he need only stretch out his hand. He who communicates loses himself in God like a drop of water in the ocean. They can no more be separated."

(St. John Vianney)

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - June 9, 2022

  

Pondering Tidbits of Truth my simple and inadequate way of providing nuggets of spiritual wisdom for you to chew on from time to time.

 

 

 

St. John Vianney

“Take in one hand a sponge full of water, and in the other a little pebble; press them equally. Nothing will come out of the pebble, but out of the sponge will come abundance of water. The sponge is the soul filled with the Holy Spirit, and the stone is the cold and hard heart which is not inhabited by the Holy Spirit.”

(From Sermons of St. John Marie Vianney)

 

Father Kevin M. Cusick

“The vaccine for the real pandemic, one of fear, is faith. There is no real control possible over physical reality, the span of a human life or the world in which we live. Only faith can open the possibility of cooperating with the Creator, acknowledging our complete dependence upon Him now and in eternity. Through prayer, committed, regular and sincere, we grow in faith.

Every time we kneel and pray, every time we seek the silence of our church and the glow of the tabernacle lamp beckoning within, we receive another dose of the only vaccine that conquers our greatest enemy, he who through fear and sin can cast both body and soul into Gehenna.

In the Mass, the perfect prayer, we truly meet and receive the One in whose infinite and everlasting love all the answers to our probing questions and baseless fears lie. “Fear is useless. What is need is Faith’.”

 (From Faith Vaccinates Against Pandemic of Fear in December 16, 2021 issue of The Wanderer)

 

Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament

 “All that you desire of me is that I remain immersed in the center of my nothingness, where, ceasing to be, I confess and proclaim in silence that You are, O my God, the One who is, and the only One worthy of being eternally. Amen.”

 (From The “Breviary of Fire” – Letters by Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament)

Worth Revisiting - I Know This Is Late, But...

Thank you once again, Allison Gingras at Reconciled To You  and Elizabeth Riordan at Theology Is A Verb  for hosting Worth Revisiting each week. It is a privilege to share our work with you and your followers.

Here is another post from 2011:

 

I Know This Is Late, But...

(Originally posted August 8, 2011)

We hit the trifecta of Eucharistic saints last week: St. Alphonus Liguori, St. Peter Eymard, and St. John Marie Vianney, the model for all priests. I wrote about the first two Saints, but my computer got zapped at the Catholic Writers' Guild Conference. My son-in-law just removed the bugs. What follows is what I had intended to share last week.

(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Like Saints Alphonsus and Peter, St. John Vianney gets to the heart of what it should mean to be a Catholic. Here is a sample of his wisdom on the Eucharist.

"There is nothing, so great as the Eucharist. If God had something more precious, He would have given it to us."

"We ought to visit him [Jesus in the Holy Eucharist] often.  How dear to Him is a quarter of an hour spared from our occupations or from some useless employment, to come and pray to Him, visit Him, and console Him for all the ingratitude He receives!  When He sees poor souls hurrying to Him, He smiles at them.  They come with that simplicity which pleases Him so much, to ask pardon for all sinners, and for the insults of so many who are ungrateful."

Do we have sufficient faith, "to see God hidden in the priest like a light behind the glass, like wine mixed with water"? Have we taken our precious priests for granted? The Cure of Ars suggests we have.

"Were we to fully realize what a priest is on earth, we would die: not of fright but of love…Without the priest, the passion and death of our Lord would be of no avail. It is the priest who continues the work of redemption on earth…What use would be a house filled with gold, were there no one to open its door? The priest holds the key to the treasures of heaven: it is he who opens the door; he is the steward of the good Lord; the administrator of His goods."

Our Holy Father held St. John Vianney up to all our priests during the Year for the Priest, affirming what this humble man had said: "A good shepherd, a priest after God’s Heart, is the greatest treasure which the good Lord can grant to a parish, and one of the most precious gifts of divine mercy."

How well our priests and our Church would be served if all of our priests strove to follow this saint's priestly example, treasured the priesthood as he did, and heeded his advice: "O, how great is the priest!...If he realized what he is, he would die…God obeys him: he utters a few words and the Lord descends from heaven at his voice, to be contained within a small host." It is for these reasons he suggested that "we ought to pity a priest who celebrates Mass as if he were engaged in something routine."

God doesn't make mistakes. He chose each and everyone of our priests. He has called each of them to be "another Christ". He calls each of them, as well as each of us, to holiness. None of us can ever achieve that goal on our own. We can and will if we make the Eucharist, the source, center and summit of our daily lives.

Our priests are under an unrelenting attack. We must appreciate, love and support each of them. We must pray for them. We must fast on their behalf. We must thank them for standing up for the Truth and for making the Eucharist the center of their priestly lives. We must stand by them when they are attacked for defending the Faith.

We must let them know that we want to accompany them on the journey to holiness and eternal life.

We must!

Pondering Tidbits of Truth - November 8, 2018

 

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. John Vianney

 "Are you there [at Mass] with the same dispositions as Our Lady on Calvary, realizing that you are in the presence of God Himself and are present at the enactment of that very same sacrifice?” 

St. Catherine of Siena 

 "It is not enough for eternal life to sweep the house clean of deadly sin. One must fill it with virtue that is grounded in love, and not merely in fear.”

(From The Dialogue)

 St. Vincent de Paul

 “When once we have placed ourselves totally in the hands of God, we have no cause to fear misfortune; for if any should come to us, He will know how to make it turn to our good by ways which we do not know now, but which, one day, we shall know.” 

(From A Year With the Saints - A Virtue For every Day of the Year)