"Prayer places our understanding in the divine brightness and light and exposes our will to the warmth of heavenly love.... "


"By making Our Lord often the subject of your meditation, your whole soul will be filled with Him."

~ St. Francis de Sales

God created this beautiful world for us (autumn and winter in Colorado)

"In order to induce our will to act with an exact compliance to the Will of God, and promote His glory, let us remember that He has set the example of loving and honoring us a thousand different ways. He drew us out of nothing, created us after His own likeness, and all other things for our use. In redeeming us, He would not employ the brightest angel, but His only Son, Who paid the price of the world, not with silver or gold, which are perishable things, but with His sacred Blood, and that by a death not less ignominious than cruel. He watches continually over us for our security against the fury of our enemies, fights for us by His holy grace, and, in order both to nourish and strengthen us, is ever ready to feed us with the Precious Body of His Son in the Sacrament of the altar. Are not these convincing proofs of the excessive love which God bears for us?"

~ Dom Lawrence Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat.

He has "loved us and honored us in a thousand ways". He "watches over us" and even "fights for us". These are words worth contemplating....

until the day we die and finally meet Him Face to Face. 

Will He find that we have responded to Him with all the love we had?

Or will He find that we took His Love for granted?

Dom Lawrence Scupoli, in his The Spiritual Combat, says that we should do everything from the pure motive of wanting to do the Will of God...not just to gain Heaven or avoid Hell...not just to be well thought of by others, but purely because we want to please Almighty God by doing His Holy Will. He writes:

"One cannot imagine what efficacy this motive has, since the least action performed for His holy sake, although ever so inconsiderable, far surpasses many others, though of much greater moment, when executed with another view....This holy practice of performing our actions with the sole intention of pleasing God, may carry some difficulty with it at first, but time will render it familiar and even delightful, if we use ourselves [get ourselves used to] seek[ing] God in the sincerity of our hearts; if we sigh continually after Him as the only and sovereign good, deserving to be sought, valued, and loved by all His creatures beyond anything else."

Imagine the peace of soul we would experience if every little action of ours was performed just for Him? When things didn't work out, it would be His Will. And when things did work the way we hoped, all would redound to His Greater Glory. He would give us the greatest serenity and tranquility imaginable.

St. John of God (1495-1550), the saint for today, gave us the following mighty example. Though we may not be asked to imitate it specifically, it can inspire us to greater courage in the things we are asked to do, and in the motive for which we do them:

"A great fire broke out in the hospital at Granada [Spain]. St. John, fearlessly passing through the flames, went from room to room and brought out the sick, and saved much of the furniture, he himself escaping without the slightest harm, though he was exposed to the fury of the flames for half an hour. The flame of Divine love which burned in his heart surpassed the intensity of the material fire."

 ~ Fr. Francis Xavier Weninger, St. John of God, Founder of the Order of Charity, 1877. 

Today is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Here is his tomb in Toulouse, France:

One of the most amazing scenes in the lives of the saints to me, as a writer, is when Our Lord appeared to St. Thomas Aquinas and said, "Thou hast written well of Me, Thomas. What wouldst thou have?"

Now THAT is what I call being a successful writer! Right there. 

That's it. 

That's the pinnacle of success.

And Saint Thomas replied, "Only Thyself, Lord." St. Thomas, wise man that he was, knew that all we human beings need, in the end, is God.

(This is the cloister of the Dominican monastery where he is buried.)

This great priest and theologian is one of my father's favorite saints. I prayed to St. Thomas today to intercede for my dad with Almighty God. It's a wonderful, consoling thought, that I've mentioned before on this blog, that the saints are cheering us on from Heaven...they're praying for us, they're encouraging us, they WANT us to join them in eternal bliss.

“Be patient and trust your friends in Heaven. They wish you more good than you do, they care for you more than you do yourself.”

~ St. Bernadette Speaks, by Fr. Albert Bessieres, SJ, 1956.

My revised edition of the sixteenth-century classic, The Spiritual Combat, contains another short work by the same author, called Peace of Soul. I find this very exciting, as this is one of my favorite subjects to read about! :) 

Dom Lawrence Scupoli writes that the most important thing (in the search for true peace of soul) is to examine the source of all our actions. Do we act from our hearts (through love)? Or do we act through our understanding (through our brains), because we've thought out what will be most beneficial to us? Often even our good deeds have ulterior motives....we will be seen doing them, it's "a good thing to do", we will be honored by others, or even because it's a tax write-off! Instead, we should act from love, not intending to get anything out of our good actions.

Then he says if we keep examining our motives, and keep working for peace, we will eventually attain it. He knows that it's a hard battle sometimes, so he continues:

"If it should happen that the emotion be too strong to be assuaged, or the weight of affliction too heavy to be borne, let us have recourse to prayer; let us pray, and this without ceasing. Jesus prayed three times in the garden in order to teach us that prayer is the refuge and solace of every afflicted mind.

"Let us pray continually till we find all quiet within our breasts, our will submissive to that of Heaven, and our soul restored to its former tranquility."

When I want to imagine a tranquil place, I think of the green fields of Ireland.

(This picture was taken on the Beara Peninsula.)

On this first Sunday of Lent, I share this quote from Dom Hubert van Zeller's Spirit of Penance: Path to God:

"'We preach Christ crucified,' says St. Paul, and if the followers of Christ seek to crucify themselves without Christ, they are wasting their sufferings. Suffering must not be wasted: it should be gathered up and offered in union with the sufferings of Christ. Few things are so uselessly squandered as the riches of pain. Leave the Passion out of account, and suffering is not a good but an evil; take the Passion as the foundation and principle of Christian penance, and suffering is of infinite worth." 

"Suffering is of infinite worth..." (Picture taken at the Cave of St. Mary Magdalen in France)

"Frequently call to mind what we are assured of in the Holy Scriptures: those oracles of truth, in a thousand different places, that no one who puts his trust in God, shall be confounded."

~ Dom Lawrence Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat

Over and over again, Almighty God tells us that if we trust Him, we can't lose. Why do we have such a hard time wrapping our minds around this concept? I know I do. I trust for a little while, and as soon as something scary or untoward happens, (especially if it's not the way I had it all planned out in my finite wisdom), then my trust falters, or fades away altogether. And yet He told us repeatedly in the Scriptures that He would take care of us if we just trust Him.

Does this apply to the little things, like how our child will do on the Math test? Of course it does! God created mathematics! Does it apply to the big things like what will happen to our country, Holy Mother Church, the world? Of course it does! Nothing is impossible with God. 

We have to learn to trust... Father Scupoli offers four means to this end: 1. To pray for confidence in God humbly, 2. The one quoted above, 3. Whenever we are about to embark on something, realize our weakness and His strength and move forward acknowledging the one, while leaning on the other. And #4 is:

"To contemplate with a lively faith, the immense power and infinite wisdom of that Supreme Being, to Whom nothing is difficult; Whose goodness knows no limits; Whose love for those who serve Him is ever ready to furnish them with whatever is necessary for their spiritual life, and to gain a complete victory over themselves."