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This chapter (abridged) called “ Priming the Pump ” from my book “Praying on Empty” was reprinted in a daily devotional . . .   Grant, O our God, that we may know you, love you, and rejoice in you; and if in this life we cannot do these things fully, grant that we may at the least progress in them from day to day, for Christ’s sake. Amen. ~ St. Anselm My family used to spend weekends on land my father purchased in the country. Next to the house, Dad had dug a well that operated with a hand pump. Each week when we arrived, one of the first things he did was to pour a little water down the well. This “priming the pump” caused water to flow when we needed it. Similarly, there are “priming” acts you can try in order to fill your parched, empty soul and slake your thirst for God. (Remember, however, that your dryness might be a gift from God and out of your control.) Click to continue

When we suffer in isolation for our own failings or act like a scapegoat who suffers as the result of others who sin against us, we like to think of ourselves as saintly martyrs, but our suffering is anything but holy and especially not redemptive.  In fact, there is no act filled with more pride because we are in fact stealing Christ’s job. It takes humility to realize our miserable, self-inflicted suffering does not save anyone, least of all ourselves. The only way to become humble is to trust in God to save us because we realized our own efforts have failed. continue

It's a party!  Have anything beautiful, good, or true on your blog you want to share?  Come link-up and join the fun! Every Tuesday at Veils and Vocations!

I saw the trailer for The LEGO Batman Movie a few months back and thought it looked like a fairly promising family movie night choice that my husband and I might enjoy along with our 3-year-old. We'd watched The LEGO Movie and rather liked it, even if its “Everything is awesome!” song was stuck in our heads for days afterward. So, now that the Batman installment came out on DVD , we decided to give it a try, having no idea how much our expectations were about to be blown out of the water... Continue Reading

What we focus on in life makes all the difference in the world! What we focus on can either invite God's blessing into a situation or hinder his blessing. Do we look at a situation and see the majesty of God or adversity? Do we look at the world and see darkness or see opportunities for God's light to break through.  Continue Reading @ beautifulthorns>

In Latin you would say "Ordo ab chao" = "order to chaos"; and most of struggle with trying to make this a reality. Father Mike Schmitz makes a very good point about this and I would like to share it with all of you before we continue. I don't know about you but when the discussion of time management came up before I was sick, I would procrastinate. Click here to Continue 

Today marks my husband’s 64th birthday! So, I take this opportunity to wish Nick a very Happy Birthday. Have you ever wondered why we mark birthdays as a time to celebrate the passing of another year? If we gave it some thought, a birthday means that we have one less year to live on earth. We have one less year to accomplish our goals. Yet, birthdays are meant to be celebrated. Why? Because it is a very good way to show love to those we hold most dear. It’s a day to place a loved one upon a pedestal; to show that person how much they mean to us. God’s Desire As humans, we are born into families. Families act as our nucleus for love. Within families, we learn not only how to receive love, but to how to give love in return. God created humankind to live in community with each other, making us social beings yearning for love. The love that we extend to our family and friends is an... Read more...

From the Cloistered Heart

The diagram shows how a Pythagorean cup works. It's a thinking person's dribble glass , sort of. The cup, pan, and ladle in the photo is a yuza no ki . Both are gadgets used for teaching moderation. The yuza no ki is in the Ashikaga District , 足利郡 , in the Tochigi Prefecture . It hasn't been since around 1896. Ashiga District, that is. Not officially. The cup might be. It's a learning tool. Empty, it's tilted. Pour a little water in, and it goes upright. Pour in more, and it tilts again. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

As the Morning Rising: Cushendun Bay - Poem : Cushendun Bay Returns! Returns! Cry the waves As they deposit Skip-loads of tree cuttings onto the sand That person ...

I think it's not a big stretch to say that most fans of the original “Gilmore Girls” series were somewhat unsatisfied with the way it ended. Not enough closure, no real evidence of happily-ever-afters for the characters we had grown to know and love... And now, suddenly, in our social-media-outcry day and age, we have an entity like Netflix that can see a show with a cult following, realize that that cult following was unsatisfied, and identify that making a reboot of the show is a good idea. But the question is, does this reboot satisfy? Continue Reading

I discovered that giving birth and dying are not that different and life and death are not as far apart as I had once presumed. Exactly three years ago, I finally became cognizant of how thin the line between life and death really is when I nearly lost one of my daughters as she struggled to give birth. During labour, she almost bled out when she lost a litre of blood in mere seconds after an emergency C-section, the result of a series of unforeseen complications, a one-in-ten-thousand chance. continue

First Steps (after Millet) , Van Gogh  [ Web Gallery of Art ] For Readings and Reflections for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A,  click on the following:   Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A A Beggar Boy with a Piece of Pie Master of the Blue Jeans [ Web Gallery of Art ]

"Crisis" or not, opioid overdose is a problem. A lethal one, sometimes. We've used one opioid, opium, for millennia. Others have been developed during my lifetime. They're all useful: and dangerous if misused. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

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Joy of community. Writers go forth. Onward and Upward. God Bless Welcome, Join me in my camp here. Are you familiar NaNoWriMo? It is National Novel Writing Month. It is a virtual camp for writers to achieve their goals in creative writing. Having tried to do this camp NaNoWriMo thing for years. Finally, I am a participant yeah for me. In July, the writer can choose their own word count. Well, in any camp you can. Just do not let the stress and getting it perfect get to you anymore. My saying is “better done than perfect”. If I reach the goal, great and if I do not great. I am participating, to me that is all that matters right now.                 read more

The stress of life can cause anyone to fall behind and, for those of us with chronic illness, we fight this battle daily. I mean that if you work full time, have chronic pain (or maybe your child is chronically ill and, if so, I pray for you and your family), if you have small children (or large ones), pets or a hobby if you’re lucky; you end up falling behind.  We all do different things to benefit our families and sometimes the pay out is not a monetary one (even if it can be also that as well). If you are a stay-at-home wife or mom, you are worth just as much as you would be if you were working. If you collect disability, that’s the insurance for if you did work. If you work full time or part time you are truly blessed; as are all you wonderful business owners and women with side hustles.  Click here to continue and for scripture to help you get though it! 

Yesterday, in the United States, we celebrated Independence Day with an assortment of fireworks displays throughout the country. As with this type of celebration, the day after seems like quite a letdown, doesn’t it? The evening before was exciting, filled with color, splash and sound! Today, all is quiet and serene. We can draw a correlation between celebrating the Fourth of July and marriage. How so, you might ask? Fireworks and Marriage When we initially meet our spouse, it’s like fireworks are going off all the time. Life is filled with excitement. Everything around us seems to come to life. Then we settle into a relationship, with its ups and downs. Yet, the fire is still strong; so strong, that we decide to marry. Much time is spent preparing for the wedding ceremony and celebration. Planning for the big day can create excitement, color and splash! My Own Fireworks I remember planning my own wedding 38 years ago this month. I experienced that sense of... Read more...

Saturday’s first reading at Mass included the angel’s words to Abraham about Sarah becoming pregnant at the age of ninety: “Is anything too marvelous for the Lord to do?” This is echoed by the angel Gabriel when he tells Mary that the elderly Elizabeth will bear a son: “For nothing will be impossible with God.” Relying on the truth of those statements, I’m venturing into a new project: marketing my books—more than eighty of them. One by one they are going out of print before the world has read them, or even know they exist! Nowadays marketing is done via social media, which to me is complicated and overwhelming. Hence the need for a miracle. In addition, ideas I’ve proposed have been blocked, so much so that I commented, “I keep running into a brick wall.” I was on the verge of giving up marketing. But then, last week on the first evening of my annual retreat, I began reading a book (on being happy). Not once but twice it advised that when you run into a brick wall, thro

As the Morning Rising: My uniqueness is of His making. : If there are ways in which I may feel left out, left behind, not one of the in set, let me remember in those moments of doubt t...

I remember when “Gilmore Girls” was in its last few seasons on the CW. I was in high school at the time, and it was one of the first shows that I ever watched weekly as it aired. Eventually I gave up on watching it back then, because of the terrible plot directions of the sixth season. I never had seen all of the earlier episodes in order, just some of them as re-runs. So years later, when I found that it was on Netflix, I decided to give it a proper watch... Continue Reading

Today is American Independence Day. It's also the anniversary of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland's publication and Trois-Rivières founding day. Ashikaga Yoshiakira's birthday, Pactum Sicardi , and whole bunch of other stuff make this day important, too. More at A Catholic Citizen in America .

Jonathan Byrne is a professional mid-career artist who lives in the coastal town of Blackrock in Dublin, Ireland. After many years of making images and exhibiting at home and abroad, he returned to a subject that has always enthralled him, the Face of Christ. The images, of which there are over 30 in different colours, are being assembled into an exhibition that will go on tour in Europe in 2018. I interviewed him via email over the past week. Melanie: How would you describe yourself? JB:  I would describe myself as a servant to a thought that a life should be spent in crafting a decorative, and, hopefully, a more beautiful world around you. This can be done with prayer devotions or parenthood or building nice roads or colourful gardens but in my case, the images are the thing. I believe that there is an appetite amongst a new generation for a relationship with Christ and I hope that my images, being both modern and traditional, can be part of the language of those new relation

Here’s my confession: I have never been good at memorizing rote prayers, beyond the basics. My prayer life, historically, has been one of a free-flowing style, telling God what is on my mind. Within my prayer life, I seek His direction. Yet, I never said rote prayers beyond the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be. That was, until one day, after having a serious conversation about prayer with a priest friend of mine. The Value of Rote Prayers Father Benjamin helped me to see the value of rote prayers, as well as their importance. When we can’t find the right words to communicate our feelings, rote prayers rescue us, and assist us in opening our hearts to the Lord. For months prior to this conversation with Father Benjamin, I had been... Read more... 

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As the Morning Rising: Music : Music We lift up our hearts. The buried song resounds Once more. From ocean depths To highest heaven There soars In silence, and in s...

Welcome Here with me, today guest posting is Steve Sawyer. He has more than three decades of experience as a writer, editor, reporter, technical writer and writing teacher. He graduated from Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama with a degree in journalism studies. He and his wife Marie, co-parent their two granddaughters, four and seven. He sings in his church choir and remains active in his men’s prayer group. Since he retired in 2010 he enjoys writing for his family-friendly, Christ-centered blog Monday through Friday. He is passionate about writing to help readers know, understand, believe, and live out of their true identity in Christ. Sweet Tea and Jesus  Folks who live outside the Deep South don’t understand Sweet Tea. If you go to most restaurants or truck stops north of the Tennessee  read more

One day, I scheduled a good sized block of minutes for uninterrupted concentration on God. I actually try to do this regularly, but on this day in particular I was ready and waiting. I had even dug through my bookshelves for an unused journal (I have several waiting in the wings) in order to make notes of What I Did Not Miss. I sat with a list of suggestions on how to pray with Scripture and opened my Bible to a reading from the Gospel of Luke. I read a few lines slowly, and waited. I read the lines again, and waited. I asked Jesus what He wanted to reveal to me, and I waited. 'Keep on doing this until the words begin to live,' the anonymous Religious had suggested. So I did. The words I read were good words, holy words, straight-from-the-written-Word-of-God-words, and I received them with gratitude. I thanked God for the words, and for His written word, and for gifts I was aware of and gifts I didn't know I was receiving. But did the words live? From

My father reminded me of this good advice when I was in my teens: "...whatever is true, ... whatever is lovely, ... think about these things." My response was something like '...because they won't last.' I wasn't happy about saying that at the time. I still regret it. I can't, of course, undo what was done. And the time for telling my father "I'm sorry" has long since passed. In any case, I said "I'm sorry" too often, and that's almost another topic. The quote is from Philippians 4:6 - 9 . I'll get back to that. Following the advice from Philippians isn't easy for me. But it's been getting easier as I work though a massive backlog of bad habits. Nothing unusual there, since we're all dealing with consequences of a bad choice described in Genesis 3:1 - 13 . 1 ... More at A Catholic Citizen in America .