Association Of Catholic Bloggers

The Sin I Hate to Admit to is Envy A few years ago I was sitting in a conference hall awaiting the next speaker.  It was Jeff Cavins and he was coming up to speak about envy.  I actually contemplated going to do something else for that hour because although I knew I had an occasional issue with jealousy, I was all set in the envy arena. OH my, was I wrong!!  Probably why the Spirit sat me mid-row that day; and as I looked down the row and realized how many people I'd have to vault and navigate to leave, I decided to leave my bottom planted and listen.

Spare a moment and a prayer for the political types, please and thank you. I’m one of them. The bitter election-year exchanges on every platform are part of my daily life. Whether on television on online, shutting them down altogether is not an option, appealing though it may be. Politics is part of my vocation. Times like these, I’m tempted to wish it were otherwise. This is a plague-on-both-your-houses year, looking at the major parties’ candidates for president. I am reading  C.S. Lewis’s   Mere Christianity  this month, and something he wrote in there captures my attitude. I feel a strong desire to tell you – and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me – which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs – pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw...

What is fear to you? Is it the monster in the closet that looms over you in the middle of the night? Is it those butterflies that won't stop fluttering in your stomach? Is it that dread you wake up with, morning after morning? Cesar Mascarenhas Child Imagination, Flickr Creative Commons What do you do with fear? Do you run away from it? Do you run straight into it? Do you pretend it's not there, blocking it out by doing something that makes you feel good (whether it's good for you or not)? Fear comes home Fear was my constant companion the year my father was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. At first I blocked out my fear by turning to food therapy, bingeing on junk food. My exercise regimen went out the window and and my weight shot up. In the end I felt worse rather than better. Meanwhile, my dad was dying and there was no time to waste. Turning towards fear There comes a point when the effort to avoid fear (and the ensuing burden of guilt) e...