Association Of Catholic Bloggers

God calls us each to holiness, to sainthood. Every day, each experience we have helps us grow in our faith and in our purpose: To achieve holiness; to become saints; to fully become the person God intends us to be. Each experience, then, has the potential to be “purgative.” Purgation is a process that gets us ready for God. Just as God’s grace was given to the martyrs, so it is given to us to grow in holiness and towards sainthood. In this process, it is imperative to see God as the Potter and know that we are the clay. Each experience, then, is given over to God for His guidance and our growth. Sainthood means allowing God to mold us just as a Potter molds clay. ( Isaiah 64:7) Everything we experience is an opportunity to grow in our holiness. God can “make us worthy and powerfully bring to fulfillment every good purpose” by giving us circumstances that cause us to depend on Him, to trust in Him, and to respond according to His will In other words, through ou...

My husband and I joined some of the pilgrims from our trip to Italy last year in Traverse City, MI this past weekend. It was a blessed time and is really why a pilgrimage is something you think you are doing for yourself but is really something God is doing for you! It took us 25 years of saving to get to Italy but was something that continues to give back to us. If you've never taken a pilgrimage, you may want to ask God to show you if this is something He is asking you to do. Sitting at Dave and Claire's breathtaking home with a view of God's beautiful earth! Everyone at dinner (from close left around table to close right): John, me, Dave, Laura, Julie, Tim, Father Libby, Teresa, Dom, Laura, Dave Everyone at Chateau Chantel Deacon explaining wine making Bishop Bernard Hebda joins us at Claire and Dave's  John and I in from of an ironwork that proclaims and reminds: I am the vine, you are the branches

Okay, so my son helped me get set up with a Twitter account yesterday. And while I am not sure about this latest foray--mostly because I don't want it to gobble up my God-time--I wonder what the strange new world will hold. As I shopped this morning for some ingredients to a new recipe that I will be trying out tonight, I found myself thinking of things to tweet. For instance I needed something called Kaffir Lime Grass and was clueless; I suddenly thought of my 4 followers and wondered if any could help... Just what I was afraid of! Usually I am thinking about God when I grocery shop. I think I need to talk with some Twitter czars and see how they do it all! Any suggestions? Cheryl Dickow www.BezalelBooks.com

This is a post-script to my post about our son's 12th birthday. I'm writing this upstairs in  our bedroom. Downstairs are five 12-year-old boys, watching "Dawn of the Dead" and eating an inordinate amount of candy they bought at the local convenience store and at the Rite Aid downtown. What just happened moves me deeply. One of their friends, who has been my son's friend since preschool, just left. C. became deeply troubled by the movie. He called his parents on his cell and told them he wanted to go home. They were on a date and told him they would come home soon. Then C. headed up the stairs and knocked on my bedroom door. "There is no way I can sleep here tonight," he told me. "I am terrified."  His parents said to head home and they would be back in a few minutes. Read more...

The connection between the Carmelite Order and the Royal House of France originated in the Middle Ages, when St. Louis IX encountered the hermits on Mt. Carmel and brought them to France. When the Discalced Reform came to France from Spain in the early seventeenth century, the royal family assisted the nuns with their patronage. The French court was shaken in 1674 when Louise de la Vallière , the former mistress of Louis XIV, publicly begged the queen's forgiveness and entered a Carmelite monastery. In his book To Quell the Terror , William Bush details the many connections of the later Bourbons with Carmel, particularly the patronage of Queen Marie Lesczynska and her daughter Madame Louise . When Louise herself chose to become a Carmelite nun in 1770, it cemented the spiritual ties between those in the worldliness of Versailles and those in the austerity of the cloister. Marie-Antoinette of Austria married the Dauphin in the same year that Madame Louise entered the mo...

I had one of those lovely moments of insight and grace yesterday afternoon, which was sorely needed after the second night's disturbed sleep in a row I have been waking up feeling horribly anxious and panicky over Mum moving, and feeling I can't cope, and we haven't got enough time to get things ready! I never feel like this in the day and can always successfully deal with any anxiety very quickly! But at 3.30 in the morning, it is an entirely different experience. I feel overwhelmed, and scared and very anxious. I know all the techniques, and what works for me, but it doesn't seem to work in the middle of the night! I pray, I hand it over to God, I invite the presence of the Holy Spirit into the situation, but my mind keeps returning to whatever is bothering me. I know what the Psalmist meant when he wrote of "the terrors of the night"! In the end, all that really seems to help is to get up, make a cup of tea, sit in the garden (yes, in the we...