Franciscan Quote of the Day

Our souls are like wood: the more they imbibe the oil of submission and humility the more they are set on fire with divine love.

~St. Clare of Montefalco

If you are what you are meant to be, you will set the world on fire.

~St. Catherine of Siena

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

City of Man and the City of God intermingle. We have obligations to each. But our final home and our real citizenship are not in this world. Politics is important, but it’s never the main focus or purpose of a Christian life. If we do not know and love Jesus Christ, and commit our lives to him, and act on what we claim to believe, everything else is empty.

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

Religion isn’t something we tack on to life like a crumbling doily, in other words: religion suffuses life, drives life, sets life on fire. “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” said Christ (Lk. 12:49). “Religion consists of the belief that everything that happens to us is extraordinarily important. It can never disappear from the world for this reason,” noted the Italian poet (and suicide) Cesare Pavese.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

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

Pita: Dear God, I do not ask for health or wealth. People ask you so often that you can’t have any left. Give me, God, what else you have. Give me what no-one else asks for. Amen.

~Man on Fire (A 2004 film directed by Tony Scott)