“Suppose that God wishes to fill you with honey; but if you are full of vinegar, where will you put the honey?” – St. Augustine
Today is All Souls’ Day. All the brothers and priests will go to a nearby cemetery and pray for those who have gone before us. We are conscious that at the end of their lives some vinegar may still remain; further purification is still needed. Catholics call this “Purgatory.”
Today say a prayer for your loved ones who have gone before you.
I pray daily for my friends in purgatory, the ones I know and the ones I don’t. Despite the confused and often impoverished religious formation in the 1970’s and 80’s my seventh grade teacher, Sr. Carla, managed to impress on me the importance of praying for the souls in purgatory, especially the ones who would have no one to pray for them. Over the years, God has deepened my understanding and valuation of this devotion. One thing I have come to appreciate more and believe is that they intercede for us. I think they must have been the ones to obtain for me the grace to spend a year in purgatory.
There are two key characteristics to purgatory. The first is that the souls who are there have been judged. When we die, we undergo what is called the particular, or individual, judgment. Scripture says that “it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27). I experienced what Romano Guardini says about judgment: “In this world, truth is weak. A trifle suffices to hide it…but it will change…God will bring it about that truth will be as powerful as it is true and this will be the judgment. Judgment means that the possibility of lying ceases because omnipotent truth penetrates every mind, illumines every word and rules in every place. Then falsehood will be revealed as what it is.” (Learning the Virtues, 22-23) Last year, God allowed His truth, my truth to penetrate my mind with searing clarity. He stripped away the layers and said it like it was. He used the people in my life to do this. He used excruciatingly painful interpersonal experiences. He also used books. Among others, two powerful tools were works of C. S. Lewis: The Great Divorce and Till we Have Faces. Through those literary pieces, time and again, God said to me as the prophet Nathan once said to the great King David, “You are that man!” Continue reading
Have you ever wondered, “Why the Eucharist?”
Why did Christ choose the appearance of bread to come to us? To be present on earth? To remain in our tabernacles?
I don’t know, but knowing him – his simplicity, his desire to draw us close to him, his reassuring presence, his passionate thirst for each of us- it’s so we have an open door to his Heart.
That’s my King.
Today we celebrate All Saint’s Day! To celebrate today isn’t just about giving honor to those who have made it to heaven, because really what we have to offer adds nothing to the greatness that they already share. Rather today is about us. God invites us to be saints. God invites us to Eternal Life. He wants us to be with Him for all eternity. The saints sing this song today before His throne: “Salvation comes from our God”. He has won this for us. This is what gives us hope. This is why it is worth living the faith. This is why it is worth doing good. The journey to heaven is hard, but the beautiful thing about that journey is that we are never alone. We have the saints in heaven interceding for us, and we have our brothers and sisters in the faith to help us on this journey. The real saint is like a pillar who is held up by holding up others. We can’t be saints alone. We are all in this together. This feast is about our journey to God and walking together in order to make it there.
“Pope Francis…I love Pope Francis.. I love Jesus.. I love Pope Francis ….” this is what people heard as we marched down the city streets of Philadelphia during the World Meeting of Families. We made quite a stir. People pulled out their iphones to record us, and many came up and asked us who we were. After all, it’s not every day that you run into an army of 45 young men dressed as priests singing in the street. Continue reading
Guarding 40 donuts that are hanging on a string at the front door of a school at dismissal time. Funniest. Job. Ever.
About 100 kids walked by asking how much the donuts cost, and I got to practice my Spanish explaining to them that I wasn´t selling them, that they were for a game for the ECyD kickoff.
That afternoon at the Everest School Monteclaro really made my week. It began one of my apostolic experiences here in Madrid, as I will be helping with the ECyD club there this year. The theme was Candy Land, so each girl brought her favorite chuches to share (as they call candy here), and everyone dressed up like different types of sweets: cupcakes, bubblegum, lollipops, Sugus (a version of Starburst), M&M´s, PEZ, and more. After announcing the teams for the year and a skit about ECyD done by some of the girls, the teams started a race to complete different challenges in Candy Land. Like eating a donut that´s hanging a string without using your hands. Continue reading
“Exult and proclaim… that the Lord has delivered his people” (first October 25). God has freed us and given us New Life! This should be our source of joy and reason to rejoice. In order to know that we have been freed, there had to have been a time in which we weren’t free. In the gospel today, Christ healed the blind man, Bartimaeus. Maybe we aren’t blind, like Bartimaeus, but there is another reality that at times we can’t see. Bartimaeus couldn’t see Christ physically, but he believed. He believed because he was in need. In the end this sight of faith opened the doors to be able to see. We have many things in our life which fog up God’s presence and we can’t see clearly. Only with an act of faith can we really see the need that is in our heart for Him. Once we see this need and turn to God letting Him be the one to cure us and fill us, then we will be able to rejoice because The Lord has freed us.
“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over FOR US all, how will he not also give us EVERYTHING else along with him?” Romans 8:31-32
St. Paul’s words are bold.
He dares to hope in God’s abundance. Such confidence must have come from experiencing Christ’s passionate and personal love in an intense way.
Re-reading his quote reminds us that God promises us his fidelity. He promises his presence and his goodness, whether leading us “through verdant pastures” or through “the valley of death” (Psalm 23).
If Christ is my King, what can stand against me?
A young man asked Socrates the secret to success. Socrates told the young man to meet him near the river the next morning. They met. Socrates asked the young man to walk with him toward the river. When the water got up to their neck, Socrates took the young man by surprise and ducked him into the water. The boy struggled to get out but Socrates was strong and kept him there until the boy started turning blue. Socrates pulled his head out of the water and the first thing the young man did was to gasp and take a deep breath of air. Socrates asked, ‘What did you want the most when you were there?” The boy replied, “Air.” Socrates said, “That is the secret to success. When you want success as badly as you wanted the air, then you will get it.” There is no other secret.
I can’t imagine how to carry such a cross as blindness. It was a tragedy and yet a blessing. As tragedy, he no longer could see and was relegated to eating dust daily as he sat at the roadside begging. Yet, there was a blessing. This blindness would drive him to seek out Jesus. Just like a small fire cannot give much heat, a weak desire cannot produce great results…Jesus passed by Bartimaeus who knew it was his moment; he acted. Continue reading
A new study finds evidence that watching Sesame Street has about the same benefit for kids as going to preschool.
This could change everything.
I went to preschool when I was a little darling. They didn’t have Sesame Street back then, but I watched Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room.
My son and daughter also went to preschool and neither much liked Sesame Street. But even if they had loved the show, we would have sent them to preschool where they interacted with live humans. (To be honest, one of the preschool teachers was a little like Oscar the Grouch, but she did keep the kids in line.) Continue reading