So many today do not understand the call to holiness. We are all called to holiness, but we must work at it. Is it easier to just live out the struggles of the day and "get through life" knowing and hoping that it will just all end soon? Or is it easier to grow in understanding and wisdom through prayer and devotion to our Creator and Redeemer? Most of us know the Our Father, but how many of us really listen and comprehend the words? "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven..." When you pray these words, do they touch your heart or are they just words? Yes, we are all called to be saints! St. Augustine said it so well! "Our hearts are restless, Lord, till they rest in you." And he didn't mean we had to die to find Jesus. His presence is real. Heaven can be found now, just as surely as we can also find hell on this earth. Which one does your heart long for? If it's Heaven than you will get on your knees every day and give God praise and thanksgiving for His goodness and great mercy. For He alone must be the center of your life. God desires to bless us! But we must choose to open our hearts to receive His blessings and grace! God bless one and all!
From a letter to Diognetus
No man has ever seen God or known him, but God has revealed himself to us through faith, by which alone it is possible to see him. God, the Lord and maker of all things, who created the world and set it in order, not only loved man but was also patient with him. So he has always been, and is, and will be: kind, good, free from anger, truthful; indeed, he and he alone is good.
He devised a plan, a great and wonderful plan, and shared it only with his Son. As long as he preserved this secrecy and kept his own wise counsel he seemed to be neglecting us, to have no concern for us. But when through his beloved Son he revealed and made public what he had prepared from the very beginning, he gave us all at once gifts such as we could never have dreamt of, even sight and knowledge of himself.
When God had made all his plans in consultation with his Son, he waited until a later time, allowing us to follow our own whim, to be swept along by unruly passions, to be led astray by pleasure and desire. Not that he was pleased by our sins: he only tolerated them. Not that he approved of that time of sin: he was planning this era of holiness. When we had been shown to be undeserving of life, his goodness was to make us worthy of it. When we had made it clear that we could not enter God’s kingdom by our own power, we were to be enabled to do so by the power of God.
When our wickedness had reached its culmination, it became clear that retribution was at hand in the shape of suffering and death. The time came then for God to make known his kindness and power (how immeasurable is God’s generosity and love!). He did not show hatred for us or reject us or take vengeance; instead, he was patient with us, bore with us, and in compassion took our sins upon himself; he gave his own Son as the price of our redemption, the holy one to redeem the wicked, the sinless one to redeem sinners, the just one to redeem the unjust, the incorruptible one to redeem the corruptible, the immortal one to redeem mortals. For what else could have covered our sins but his sinlessness? Where else could we—wicked and sinful as we were—have found the means of holiness except in the Son of God alone?
How wonderful a transformation, how mysterious a design, how inconceivable a blessing! The wickedness of the many is covered up in the holy One, and the holiness of One sanctifies many sinners.
St. Monica Parish
Why I Pray! Jesus is present in the Tabernacle. He promised to never leave us and his promise is true.
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