Find what you’re looking for
There seems to be a push to return to the Latin Mass and all its implications. Our parish has become very divided when this was imposed on us with refusal of Communion in the hand, reintroduction of Communion rails, and traditional hymns replaced by Latin ones. Our bishop seems to favor these changes. People are leaving our parish.
Sometimes at night I cry about my own death and the afterlife. At 17, I don’t want to make wrong choices (especially about chastity). Why am I so worried about death and the afterlife?
Thanks for writing. I hope you find this reply helpful. As someone who taught high school students for 16 years full-time and three more years part-time, I appreciate that you find death scary. At age 71, I’m probably closer to death than you are.
We cannot see God with our physical eyes nor can we find God through the logic of reason. The more we try to see God with our physical eyes or find God through logical analysis, the more we will fail. We will become increasingly frustrated and God will become more distant to us. To see the extraordinary ordinariness of God is to see with a different set of eyes, the eyes of the heart and to know God by a different logic, the logic of love. What Francis tells us in his Admonition is that we must contemplate the mystery of God.
Francis looked intently, and he looked with reverence and with love. He is moved. And it is that movement of the heart that leads to action. At the very least, it leads to praise; or if what is seen is broken or hurt, it leads to the need to help the other. And that need to help for Francis is not minimal. He pushes the envelope, for example, vis-à-vis the lepers. He doesn’t simply give them a coin or food. He goes and lives among them and “works mercy with them.” It is a mutual exchange. They both experience mercy.
A preference for light and beauty is one of the reasons St. Francis is attractive to us and why he was so successfully a peacemaker in his own time. It is why today his town of Assisi has been the site of peace conferences and prayer meetings to promote peace. St. Francis is seen as the gentle saint who shows us that the way to peace and justice is the way Christ has shown us in the Gospels, namely, the way of the love of God, which is THE way; and its companion is the way of love of our neighbor as ourselves. This basic Gospel truth is the message of the Gospel St.
Is there a method for cultivating mindfulness? Yes, there are many methods. The one I have chosen is gratefulness. Gratefulness can be practiced, cultivated, learned. And as we grow in gratefulness, we grow in mindfulness. Before I open my eyes in the morning, I remind myself that I have eyes to see, while millions of my brothers and sisters are blind—most of them on account of conditions that could be improved if our human family would come to its senses and spend its resources reasonably, equitably.
Whenever we speak about love, we are speaking about relationship. Bonaventure wrote that love is the gravity of the soul; it is what pulls us toward God. We could also say that love is the glue of the universe; it is what constantly holds everything together even when things fall apart. It is simply impossible to think of love sitting on an island all alone. Love likes company. Love means going out to the other for the sake of the other.
Gratefulness strengthens a sense of belonging. There is no closer bond than the one which gratefulness celebrates, the bond between giver and thanks-giver. Everything is gift. Grateful living is a celebration of the universal give-and-take of life, a limitless “yes” to belonging.
— from the book The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life
I once heard a priest refer to everyone he met as a “saint.”
The Eucharist was the summit of St. Francis’ faith life.
