Happy New Year!

I would like to focus on one excellent idea for a New Year's resolution. Daily meditation. Catholics have been meditating since the beginning, but the world has hijacked this idea and turned it into something where you just empty yourself, perhaps rock, perhaps hum, and try to make your mind a complete blank. True meditation consists of filling yourself with God. Filling your mind and your soul with His life and His being. Concentrating our little minds on His Immenseness, our little hearts on the ocean of His Love, our little souls on the magnificence of His Omnipotence.  

Maybe this little excerpt will help:

 "What do you have to do? Simply this: you have to make up your mind that every day you will spend a little time - say a quarter of an hour - being with God, being aware of Him. And how can anyone be aware of the Invisible? You try to make yourself quite quiet; and then, perhaps with the help of some book which seems to make God very real, you think a little about Him: you can praise and thank and love and be sorry and put yourself in His Hands. Some people find that they do not need that preliminary reading or thinking; they can fix their eyes for a moment on the tabernacle, for instance, and then can at once begin to say slowly over and over again some little phrase which for them individually is very full of meaning, very full of God - it might for example be..."My Lord and my God" - but whatever it is, it seems to plunge them into the infinity of God; and they repeat the phrase or a word from it as long as it does so help them, and then they go on to another......What is certain is that, if sometimes this prayer time is full of joy and happiness, at other times it will be very hard work indeed and full of distractions, and then you will be tempted to give it up as hopeless. That is the one thing you must never do: those are the times when the real work is done."

~ Fr. Gerald Vann, O.P. 

Gratitude is given to Fr. Richard Boyle, who quoted this in his December issue of "The Carpenter."

Here are some other examples of phrases to focus our minds on the Infinite:

"The Word made Flesh"

"Ask and you shall receive"

"Come to Me all you who labor and are burdened"

"Come, follow Me"

"I am the Bread of Life"

"I am the Way, the Truth and the Life"

"Greater love than this no man hath"

"Before Abraham came to be, I Am."

"Take up thy cross daily, and follow Me."

"He that followeth Me, walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of life."

"And your joy no man shall take from you."