In our last post we considered the power of God’s love as the ground of married love. In this post, we will ponder the divine love which looks on marriage with resurrected eyes and delve deeper into the kind of prayer faithful marriage requires. Resurrected Eyes. The Gospels invite us to contemplate all marriage, even
In the last post, we looked at St. Hildegard’s vision in which hell is at war with marriage. In this war, human cleverness and resourcefulness are of limited value. Only God can hold together what He has joined. In this post, we will ponder the power of God’s love as the ground of married love.
Venerable Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan exhorted the faithful while he was in prison, “If you desire peace, you will have to fight continuously.” This constant struggle is true not only for the heart but also for the sacredness of marriage. Our culture has come to despise the faithful love of husband and wife.
In our last post, we introduced Saint John of Avila’s teaching in his lifetime project Audi, Filia. To help us understand how important it is for us to order our lives to the silence of prayer, Saint John of Avila tells us about the dark languages of this world that can lead us astray. He
St John of Avila’s master work in the spiritual life is Audi, Filia or Listen, O Daughter. This treatise for Sancha Carrillo, one of his penitents, was started while he was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He continued to develop and revise the original text for more than thirty years. In fact, the final revisions were
Peacemaking A troubled reader writes… “Although I am a convert to Catholicism, I am sad and offended that the Catholics would forget what Jesus would do with regards to breaking bread with any of his children. I too am a Eucharistic Minister and I would never turn anyone down from breaking bread with their fellow
A troubled reader writes… “Although I am a convert to Catholicism, I am sad and offended that the Catholics would forget what Jesus would do with regards to breaking bread with any of his children. I too am a Eucharistic Minister and I would never turn anyone down from breaking bread with their fellow man
A troubled reader writes… “Although I am a convert to Catholicism, I am sad and offended that the Catholics would forget what Jesus would do with regards to breaking bread with any of his children. I too am a Eucharistic Minister and I would never turn anyone down from breaking bread with their fellow man
Prayer and Orthodoxy Dan Burke recently began posting a three part response, in the National Catholic Register, to a question about false teaching on prayer. The question was how do we know when a teaching is false. The answer is not easy, but even in the very first part of his answer, Dan gets us
I recently accompanied a group of pilgrims from the Tatra Mountains of Poland to Warsaw for the Year of Faith. Twenty years ago, the Pilgrim Pope came to celebrate World Youth Day in Denver and spent time in prayer in a retreat center, high up in the Rocky Mountains. We decided that we would go to
Faith in Christ opens us to unconquerable ecclesial horizons even when love seems impossible and the world is falling apart around us. It is about the solidarity we have in Christ. The solidarity that compels us to pray in terms of “we” and “our” instead of remaining on the level of “I” and “mine.” The
At the center of the spiritual life is the real presence of Christ Jesus given to us in the Eucharistic worship He instituted for our sake. Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, reminds us of the proper disposition we must maintain throughout our worship. It is a disposition of quaerere Deum, a reverent
Contemplative Prayer and Theology Contemplation needs scientific theology and theologians need contemplation. Historically, contemplatives who have presumed otherwise unwittingly submitted themselves and those they influenced to all kinds of demeaning irrationality. At the same time, whenever theologians believe they can conduct their investigations without prayer, their body of scholarship becomes less capable of building up
In the wisdom of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, there is great reason to be confident as we begin to learn to love God. He is not ignorant of the fact that most of us often fall short in our efforts to seek God and live according to His commands. His exhortation stands, not on the
Is it possible to pray out of misery without falling into self-pity? The question, posed by one of our readers, indicates a grave evil confronted in prayer. Misery is the demeaning absence of God’s love, a love we have rejected. Without the love God created us to know, we are restless and in our restlessness
