Harvesting The Fruits of Contemplation

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. Thomas Aquinas, O.P. "As mariners are guided into port by the shining of a star, so Christians are guided to heaven by Mary."  (From Mary: Mother of God by Chukwueloka Okolo) St. Rose of Lima " If only mortals would learn how great it is to possess divine grace, how beautiful, how noble, how precious. How many riches it hides within itself, how many joys and delights! Without doubt they would devote all their care and concern to winning for themselves pains and afflictions.  All men throughout the world would seek trouble, infirmities and torments, instead of good fortune, in order to attain the unfathomable treasure of grace. This is the reward and the final gain of patience.  No one would complain about his cross or about troubles that might happen to him if he...

(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons ) Today  is the memorial for St. Rose of Lima - one of three Dominican Saints who walked the streets of Lima, Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. St. Martin de Porres and St. John Macias are the other two. Neither of them were priests but both were what we would call today Dominican cooperator brothers.  St. Rose and St. Martin knew each other. She died before St. John Macias entered the Order. He never met the Rose of Lima. Martin and John, however, spent much time in each other's company. How blessed a city Lima was at that time - to have in its midst such three simple, humble, and holy souls. As I mentioned in a 2013 post, St. Rose treasured the great spiritual value of sacrificial suffering and invited us to do likewise. If you are interested to learn why, you can read about it here. Today, I wanted to share another marvelous trait this Saint displayed during her lifetime which I discovered while reading Cultivatin...

We must re-discover and courageously live out this Forgotten Truth:

We thank Allison Gingras at  Reconciled To You    and Elizabeth Riordan at  Theology Is A Verb   for hosting  Revisiting Wednesday ,  each week. It is a privilege to share our work with them and their followers .  Stop for a visit now .  I wanted to share this post: Feast Day of St. Rose of Lima (Originally published August 23, 2013)   ( Source:St. Rose of Lima Parish, Safford, AZ) Today we remember St. Rose of  Lima , the first canonized Saint of the Western hemisphere. She was born in  Peru  in 1586 and died there at the age of thirty-one. Like many who have felt a call to the Dominican Order over the centuries, Rose initially faced opposition from her family. They refused to let her enter a convent. Rose’s response was to become a Lay Dominican and to live a life of solitude and penance within the confines of her family’s home. She had a great attraction to St. Catherine of  Siena , a great lov...

(Image 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. Cardinal Charles Journet “The Church continues to live in her children who are not in the state of grace. The Church seeks to work against the evil that corrupts their souls. She struggles to keep them in her fold, to bring them back to life with her love. She con­serves them as one conserves a treasure not easily parted from. And it is not because she wants to carry around dead weight. She only hopes that through the power of patience, gentleness and pardon the sinner will make his return to her. It is like the withered branch which for lack of sap is allowed time to regain health and flower once more.” (From Theology of the Church )

  ( Source:St. Rose of Lima Parish, Safford, AZ) (I originally posted this two years ago and thought it worth running again ) Today we remember St. Rose of Lima , the first canonized Saint of the Western hemisphere. She was born in Peru in 1586 and died there at the age of thirty-one. Like many who have felt a call to the Dominican Order over the centuries, Rose initially faced opposition from her family. They refused to let her enter a convent. Rose’s response was to become a Lay Dominican and to live a life of solitude and penance within the confines of her family’s home.

Today our Dominican family celebrates the memorial of St. Rose of Lima (1586-1617). She was the first canonized saint of the Western hemisphere, a contemporary of St. Martin DePorres and Saint John Macias , and “patron saint of Lima, Peru, all the Americas, the Phillippines, India, florists, gardeners, and people ridiculed for their piety” .   The Office of Readings today offers this excerpt from her writings for our fruitful meditation and response:   Our Lord and Savior lifted up his voice and said with incomparable majesty: “Let all men know that grace comes after tribulation. Let them know that without the burden of afflictions it is impossible to reach the height of grace. Let them know that the gifts of grace increase as the struggles increase. Let men take care not to stray and be deceived. This is the only true stairway to paradise, and without the cross they can find no road to climb to heaven.” When I heard these words, a strong force came upon me an...

Did you know that three great Domician saints lived at the same time in Lima, Peru? They are  - St. Rose of Lima, St. John Macias and St. Martin de Porres. Today we celebrate the feast day of St. Martin de Porres. If you want to get a good sense of this outstanding Dominican, read A Brother to His Brothers , an article posted today by Brother John Baptist Hoang, O.P., a student at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington D.C. For your information, the Church celebrates the feast day of St. Rose of Lima on August 23rd and that of St. John Macias on September 18th. I wrote a little piece on St. Rose last August. You may be able to tease your curiosity about St. John by glancing at this brief article . St. Martin, St. Rose, St John Macias aand all the Dominican saints and blesseds, pray for us!

Today we remember St. Rose of Lima , the first canonized Saint of the Western hemisphere. She was born in Peru in 1586 and died there at the age of thirty-one. Like many who have felt a call to the Dominican Order over the centuries, Rose initially faced opposition from her family. They refused to let her enter a convent. Rose’s response was to become a Lay Dominican and to live a life of solitude and penance within the confines of her family’s home. She had a great attraction to St. Catherine of Siena , a great love for the Blessed Sacrament, and limitless compassion for the elderly, homeless and the sick, whom she would eventually care for in one of the rooms in her parents’ residence. “When we serve the poor and the sick,” she tells us, “we serve Jesus. We must not fail to help our neighbors, because in them we serve Jesus.” Rose enthusiastically embraced a life of penance and physical suffering since she also understood that “Apart from the cross, there is no other ladder by ...