Franciscan Quote of the Day

It really is a curse to be afflicted with pride. Because your chief sin is the very obstacle to understanding how much you require God’s aid. It’s a blockade. If my own opinion and way of viewing the world is always correct, if my own personal prayers are always superior to the prayers of the church, then how will I reorient myself to the reality that God is the authority of my life? I am not the authority on my life. I am not even the authority on my emotions. Could I even put into words what I’m feeling one minute to the next? Very few of the things that I will for myself are worthy of putting into words, much less a prayer. “Not my will, Thine.”

~Elizabeth Duffy

I think forgiveness is one of the surest signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is incredibly difficult, often scandalous, and yet it is the thing God absolutely demands of us if we are to have any hope whatsoever of having our own sins forgiven. Our strategies for avoiding it are numberless and becoming a Christian often only leads people to come up with ingenious theological rationales for explaining why they don’t need to do it. But Jesus is stark and plain-spoken: If you do not forgive you will not be forgiven.

~Mark Shea, Catholic and Enjoying It!

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…

“Take up thy cross,” the Savior said,
“If thou wouldst My disciple be;
Deny thyself, the world forsake,
And humbly follow after Me.”

Take up thy cross, let not its weight
Fill thy weak spirit with alarm;
His strength shall bear thy spirit up,
And brace thy heart and nerve thine arm.

Take up thy cross, nor heed the shame,
Nor let thy foolish pride rebel;
Thy Lord for thee the cross endured,
And saved thy soul from death and hell.

Take up thy cross then in His strength,
And calmly sin’s wild deluge brave,
’Twill guide thee to a better home,
It points to glory o’er the grave.

Take up thy cross and follow Christ,
Nor think til death to lay it down;
For only those who bear the cross
May hope to wear the glorious crown.

To Thee, great Lord, the One in Three,
All praise forevermore ascend:
O grant us in our home to see
The heavenly life that knows no end.

~Charles W. Ev­er­est, Vi­sions of Death, and Other Po­ems

The man who is filled with the Holy Spirit speaks in different languages. These different languages are different ways of witnessing to Christ, such as humility, poverty, patience, and obedience; we speak in those languages when we reveal in ourselves these virtues to others.

~St. Anthony (via Beauty for Ashes)

It is impossible for a person who prays regularly to remain in serious sin; because the two are incompatible, one or the other will have to be given up.

~St.Teresa of Avila

Remembrance of wrongs is the consummation of anger, the keeper of sins, hatred of righteousness, ruin of virtues, poison of the soul, worm of the mind, shame of prayer, cessation of supplication, estrangement of love, a nail stuck in the soul, pleasureless feeling cherished in the sweetness of bitterness, continuous sin, unsleeping transgression, hourly malice.

~St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent via Scott’s Catholicism Blog