"Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch."
Pope John Paul II
"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."
GK Chesterton
"Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil."
Ayn Rand
If it stops you from getting closer to God, then it needs to go.
After leaving the chapel !
- Me: *attempting to get keys out of purse in order to start car, but mindlessly grabs rosary instead* oh whoops !
- Mom: well you know, that will get you a lot further than your car ;-)
Love those who humble and contradict you, for they are more useful to your perfection than those who flatter you. - St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
"Hate the sin. Love the sinner."
St Augustine (via catholic-inspiration)
"The purification of the soul is release from the passions, and release from the passions gives birth to love."
St. Thalassios the Libyan (via pursuingchastity)
Working with sheets of paper and a scalpel, Calvin Nicholls creates these cut out paper sculptures.
the gifts and fruits of the spirit
It’s strange, and interesting, and yet a proof of the mystery of our faith: As you grow, and allow your heart to grow in faith and trust in the Lord, mature and deepen your interior life, you will see His gifts poured out unto your spirit. You begin to genuinely feel wisdom, feel patience, feel gentleness, you feel peace, etc.
So then when you are in situations in which these good things lack, when you are in any sort of dark place and you are exposed to impatience, anger, iniquity, evil, your spirit senses it so easily.
Your give substance to your spirit! You provide depth and maturity for it to reason and make sense of the things it must come across.
If you allow yourself to trust in the Lord, and deepen your inner spiritual life, then these gifts and fruits of the spirit that once seemed so abstract, merely ungraspable ideas, will become solid and tangible. You will be able to feel their presence, or lack there of, as surely as you can feel any other palpable, touchable object in this world.
A Prayer of St. Rose
Help me to remember what is really important:
that I am Your child
You are my Father
You love me for who I am and how I live
not what I look like or what I own.
Let me praise You Who sees into my heart,
Who is always with me
and Who eases my suffering.
