Practicing Dying (This Week)

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-tg8yj-13d0ba9

Obviously, one must practice dying every day, every moment, not just during one week. I am being slightly facetious by this title. But the truth is, that this week I had the opportunity, due to a bad cold, to spend time alone, in bed, and consider the path to salvation, which is dying to self and following Christ. Easy enough to say. Not easy, as we know, to do. 

Your Sayings Are Hard But You Have the Words of Everlasting Life

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-qjzrj-13bdfa6

When Jesus said that His disciples must eat his Body and drink His Blood to have everlasting life, many said that this was too hard. All of life is hard, and it out of that reality, the consequence of sin that He will bring us back to Him. Really receipt of the Body,Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ is blessedly easy, when you come to know it is truly Him. As the Living Bread He helps us navigate the hard knocks and sufferings of life. We just have to really stand firm and trust!

Our Unending Source of Joy

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-8msu3-13b3dda

Not for the first time, and not for the last, thinking about the Eucharist, probably because our Parish is hosting a Bible Study on Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper. How often have you heard that if we knew what really happens at the Mass, and embraced it, we would fall to our knees in adoration. God walks with us just as uch as He did with the Disciples. 

Today the Rainbow Bridge is a Comfort

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-tzg42-13a99f8

It’s not that I haven’t considered it before, the hope that a pet goes to heaven and I will see him or her again, but that thought always becomes intense when I lose a pet. I have had many cats, and this week I had to put an elderly beloved boy cat to sleep. I tried to avoid it. It could not be avoided any longer. And so I found myself reading the poem again, and considering the debate over whether pets go to heaven. Maybe if (hopefully) and when I get to heaven it will no longer be an issue for me, but for now. . . .I hope to be swarmed by the many animals I have lost when I reach my end. 

Prayer: The Key to Union with God Who Is, Was, and Always Will Be Love

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-n4fqj-138bfba

I have been struggling with the Ignatian Exercises. But, this week, I went back to an outline I had been given in my first exposure to the Exercises and I realized that considering the very first thing, the Creation, and my creation, in a way I had not heretofore done, was something of a jumpstart, hopefully one that will take hold. The first part of prayer, for me, for you maybe is the recognition of what it means the God is Love, that He loved me into being, that he loved you into being. Perhaps that’s what it means to “pray without ceasing”, because if you don’t do that you cannot see beyond the distractions, the shadows of this world that was marred by sin.