Franciscan Quote of the Day

We should get into the habit of asking ourselves, before the end of the day: What did Holy Spirit do in me? What witness did he give me?” Because he is a divine presence that helps us moving forward in our lives as Christians.

Pope Francis via Rome Reports.

By definition, authentic God experience is always “too much”! It consoles our True Self only after it has devastated our false self. We must begin to be honest about this instead of dishing out fast-food religion.

~Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

A Franciscan approach to ministry must always be rooted in a life of lived prayer. Those who adopt a Franciscan approach to ministry are not just people who pray, but people whose whole life serves as a prayer by their words and actions. Lived prayer is the openness to ongoing conversion that allows God to enter one’s life and transform it from the preoccupations of worldly concerns and triviality to an expression of authentic Gospel living – following Christ’s footsteps and working as God’s instrument of peace today.

~Francis of Assisi and the Future of Faith by Daniel Horan OFM

Every year God offers us this great season of humility as a chance to remember who we are as believers, reflect soberly on our actions and refocus ourselves on the source of our hope, the only real hope of a bloody and despairing world:  Jesus Christ.  We do this through prayer, silence, the sacrament of penance, seeking out and reconciling with those whom we’ve hurt, forgiving those who’ve hurt us, generosity to the poor, and fasting, not just from food, but from all those many things that distract us from the God who made and loves us.

~Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M.Cap., Preparing for the journey of Lent, 2013 via Catholic Philly

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces ‘nice’ people, not heroes.

~Dr. Peter Kreeft, via Little Portion Hermitage

We must not rely too much upon ourselves, for grace and understanding are often lacking in us. We have but little inborn light, and this we quickly lose through negligence. Often we are not aware that we are so blind in heart. Meanwhile we do wrong, and then do worse in excusing it.

~Thomas à Kempis via OH……….. FRANCESCO.

We’re left with a terrain dotted by weakened Catholic forms that not only fail in their mission but also stand – without intending it– as a counter-witness to the faith.  Young people in search of meaning won’t choose Jesus Christ if they constantly encounter a faith life of worn-out structures in various stages of decline.

Renewing Catholic life is crucial to convincing young people to open their hearts to the Christian faith.  Young adults themselves need to help carry out this renewal.  The work of bringing new life to the Church and the work of reaching out to young adults can’t be understood separately.  Emerging adults are not merely one constituency among many in the Church.  They’re the future of Catholic life in flesh and blood, the key to triggering a chain reaction of conversion and new zeal.

~Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M.Cap., Young adults and ‘secrets of the heart’, address to the Catholic Campus Ministry Association’s national convention, Clearwater, Fla., Jan. 10, 2013, via God and the Machine

But I do know that we don’t need and can’t afford maintainers of the status quo.  I do know that we need visionaries; missionaries; leaders who will burn up every atom of themselves in the furnace of God’s service, so that nothing remains but the light and warmth of Jesus Christ blazing out to touch  the lives of others. We Catholics – you, me, all of us — need to be and to make a fire on the earth that consumes human hearts with God’s love.  We can’t “teach” that.  It doesn’t come from books or programs.  We need to embody it, witness it, live it.

~Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M.Cap., Young adults and ‘secrets of the heart’, address to the Catholic Campus Ministry Association’s national convention, Clearwater, Fla., Jan. 10, 2013, via God and the Machine

Too many people who claim to be Christian simply don’t know Jesus Christ. They don’t really believe in the Gospel. They feel embarrassed by their religion and vaguely out of step with the times. They may keep their religion for comfort value. Or they may adjust it to fit their doubts. But it doesn’t reshape their lives because it isn’t real. And because it isn’t real, it has no transforming effect on their personal behavior, no social force, and few public consequences.

~Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America

The construction of a Christian culture begins by lifting our own hearts up to God, without plans or reservations, and letting him begin the work. It sounds like a small thing. It is a small thing. But as Christians know better than anyone, worlds and empires, and even salvation itself, can turn on the smallest “yes.”

~Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America

Some people find these late-in-life turns to religion suspect, a sign of weakness or of one’s “losing it.” But nothing focuses the mind as much as death. There is a long tradition going back to ancient times of memento mori, remember death. Why? I suspect that in facing death one may at last see soberly, whether clearly or not, truths missed for years, what is finally worth one’s attention.

~Mark Henninger, Alfred Hitchcock’s Surprise Ending – WSJ.com.

There was a certain strong soldier who had won many victories and later became a Friar Minor. And when soldiers laughed at him because he had joined such an Order rather then the Templars or a similar Order where he could do much good and still fight battles, he replied: “I tell you that when I feel thirst, hunger, cold, and such things, the impusle of pride and concupiscence and such still attacks me. How much worse would it be if I saw my feet shod in armor and I was on a handsome horse and so on!”

And he added: “So far I was strong in fighting others – from now on I want to be strong fighting myself!”

~The Little Flowers of St. Francis, (Raphael Brown, Ed.) Additional Chapters, #17

You cannot please both God and the world at the same time. They are utterly opposed to each other in their thoughts, their desires, and their actions.

~St. John Vianney

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving You.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, You, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love —a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek—
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now You have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything You are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless You as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

via Ragamuffin Ramblings…

Life does not simply pass. It goes on into something more beautiful or more terrible, to salvation or to eternal loss. Life’s purpose and our attitude toward it must be defined by this conviction if we are believers.

~Fr. Benedict Groeschel, Arise From Darkness

“If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze!”

~St. Catherine of Siena

Transform me into yourself, so that I may no longer know myself, nor find myself, except in you.

~Thomas of Jesus quoted by Therese on Twitter

Many thousand things that I now partly comprehend I should have thought utterly incomprehensible, many things I now hold sacred I should have scouted as utterly superstitious, many things that seem to me lucid and enlightened now they are seen from the inside I should honestly have called dark and barbarous seen from the outside, when long ago in those days of boyhood my fancy first caught fire with the glory of Francis of Assisi.

~G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi

Into this universal human situation Jesus comes, saying, “Repent,” which means “change the direction in which you are looking for happiness.” Human happiness is found in the growth of unconditional love. The work of spiritual direction is to help us to become aware of the obstacles to divine love and the free circulation of that love within us. This requires the cultivation of a non-possessive attitude toward ourselves and other people. Gradually we learn that God is the true security, God truly loves us, and with this love, we can make it, even if no one else seems to care.

~ Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO, via Little Portion Hermitage

For conversion is not simply a surrendering of what you can afford to give up. It means giving up things that are so much a part of you that you couldn’t imagine yourself without them.

~Rev. James Martin, S.J., “The Church’s Easter: What Needs to Die in the Catholic Church so That it May Live”