Association Of Catholic Bloggers

When we feel cut off from God, battling a losing war with ingrained sin, the only viable solution to our dilemma is to call out to Christ to save us. Instead, most of us strive to be perfect through self-discipline. It was a shock to me when my Spiritual Director challenged this tendency by saying, "You are stealing Christ's job!" What he meant by this startling statement was, even though I thought I was a committed Catholic, I was actually ignoring the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ and the core teachings of the Church. The Problem of Ingrained Sin Mark 7:14-23  focuses on the problem of evil. It would be a depressing Scripture passage if it were not for the reality and power of the Cross because evil is so deeply ingrained in our being, that we really do not have a clue how to eliminate it from our lives on our own. continue reading

  One of the readings we chose for our wedding Mass was Isaiah 62. It reads in part: You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My delight is in her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.  For as a young man marries a virgin, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you (verses 4-5). “The Lord delights in you.” Have you ever thought about that? I can easily understand our delighting in the Lord, but His delighting in us? What could that possibly mean? God is our divine Bridegroom. He calls us to be His bride. When a young man falls in love, he doesn’t dwell on his beloved’s faults. They appear as nothing to him. He sees goodness and beauty that others have overlooked. He desires to give himself fully to her.  He desires to know everything about her. Above all, a bridegroo...

The Seven Virtues by Anton Francesco dello Scheggia (photo credit: Google Art Project). Through prayer and study, I’ve created a list of the elements of an education that I think best starts children on this road. Divine union comes through living a life of prayer and virtue. So, generally speaking, we want to teach about prayer and virtue, model them, and practice them with our children . But we also want a home and a school environment that is conducive to prayer and virtuous living. Prayer requires leisure   The Greek work schole, from which “school” comes, means “not-at-work time.” In classical society, school was a leisure activity, a pursuit of wisdom that had little to do with the workaday world. The truest education is free or liberal. It is not “useful” in a utilitarian sense. It is not servile. It is learning about things that are valuable in themselves , rather than means to obtain what we desire. I wrote about leisure’s importance several mon...