SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“Christians are told by the authors of the New Testament to rejoice and be people of hope. However, living in the same world as nonbelievers, Christians still experience, like everyone else, moments of doubt, despair, despondency….The opposite of hope is despondency and despair. According to the spiritual tradition of the Church, the state of despondency and despair is the most grievous and horrible condition that a person can be in. It is the worst and most harmful of the si

“The list of heretics using their logical and rational minds goes on and on, with many still at work today. Simply using our rational and logical minds to understand a God that is far beyond our comprehension are the very things heresies are made of... and how they continue to exist today. If you sit through a presentation from certain heretical groups, they will continually ask you: “Doesn’t this make sense to you?” They learned long ago the best approach is to appeal to rat

“The signs of God’s grace surround us and lie within us. But we have our own idols that blind us to all the signs that witness to the steadfast love of God. God is good. Yet the troubles of this world, the suffering of illness and grief, the attractions of this age, the temptations of greed, jealousy, and avarice, and the press of daily affairs conspire to hide the goodness of God from us. And in times of distress, we might even blame the Almighty and All-Merciful for our tro

“All of life’s choices have consequences, consequences for ourselves and consequences for the world around us. And when we fall into the extreme passions of sins, these consequences can be very painful and destructive, both to ourselves and to others.” (Fr. Michael Gillis) “Are the choices that people make in their lives based on reason? The “Rational Choice Theory” claims that people choose the options they believe are in their best interest. That is, they select the most re

“We are God’s vineyard, charged with bearing fruit and offering “the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name” (Heb 13:15). We are to abide in Him or risk being “cast out as a branch and . . . withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned” (Jn 15:6). Let us give God His due in the time allotted to us. Sin is around us and within us. Its allure deceives us so that we often fail to consider the cons

“There are those of us who have a narrow and limited understanding of self-denial. We pick and choose at random what we will give up and what we will do in the name of Christianity. We proceed to label them "Our little crosses we must bear." "I'll give up movies and/or TV during lent." Thus we conclude with a list of trivialities that have no bearing on the "self-denial" Jesus speaks about in our Gospel lesson for today. Christ-like self-denial goes much deeper. It penetrates

“How do we make idols in our time? Whenever organizations, behaviors, and enterprises claim the commitment and loyalty that belongs to God alone, they tempt us to idolatry. When anyone or anything demands our ultimate dedication, that is, our worship, we can be sure that the demons are hovering around us. When we join in a group, ambition, or habit whose spirit carries us away and controls us, we can be assured that the devil has recruited us…every created thing is, in its de

“…every material reality has a spiritual aspect to it, that the seen and the unseen are deeply intertwined… If we had stood at Golgotha on the day of the Crucifixion, our material eyes would have seen Roman soldiers nailing Jesus to the Cross. But our eyes of faithfulness would have seen the young Warrior, ready to do battle, about to use this Weapon of Peace, the Trophy Invincible, as His means to enter into Hades, smash down its doors, and to defeat the devil and death. If

“What lies hidden in the designs of God I confess I do not know—I am only a man—but this I know with full certainty, that, whatever it is, it is more just, more wise, and more solidly based on incomparable perfection than all the judgments of people….God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good.” (St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis) “The story of Isaac blessing his son Jacob illustrates the intense meanin

“Jesus assumed the existence of a spirit world—so much so that a major theme of His preaching highlighted the clash between two kingdoms: the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. The question is which worldview is the true one—the worldview of Jesus or our own contemporary worldview?” (Francis MacNutt) “Let us never allow this divisiveness to prevail among Christ’s people. When partisanship appears within the Church, we become troubled. At church, we hope to experience th