Daily Rosary Meditations | Catholic Prayers

Divine Providence is the way God guides all things with Wisdom, Love and Power to reach the purpose for which he designed them. CCC 321

This is so liberating – see – last night I was feeling like a caged animal because I can’t exercise with this muscular skeletal problem that causes breathing issues – but I thought – sure I can do some simple exercises – so I did and it was simple – and it was dumb as…because I cant breathe today. Idiot, idiot, idiot…Why do I do such stupid things. Then I reflected on the multiplicity of stupid and even worse sinful things I say and do: idiot, idiot, idiot. But even my stupidity and even my sin are not more powerful than the Providence of God who works all things, even my stupid choices, and my sins for my good if I love Him. Oh there are consequences, physical, moral and spiritual, but we never have cause for despair because God can even work our bad decision and even our sinful decisions for our greater good and the greater good of others and the whole world. That doesn’t give me license to do stupid or sinful things, but it does mean that I don’t have to be perfect. I can be imperfect with the will to better and God will take care of the rest.

Excessive sadness and discouragement over our bad decisions are not good and we must not view our own faults too tragically because God is able to draw good from them. Thérèse of the Child Jesus loved greatly this phrase of Saint John of the Cross: “Love is able to profit from everything, the good as well as the bad that It finds in me, and to transform it into Itself.” Our confidence in God must go at least that far: to believe that He is good enough and powerful enough to draw good from everything, including our faults and our infidelities. When he cites the phrase of Saint Paul, Everything works together for the good of those who love God, Saint Augustine adds: “even sins”! Of course, we must struggle energetically against sin and correct our imperfections. When we have been the cause of some evil, we must also try to rectify it to the extent that this is possible. But we must not distress ourselves excessively regarding our faults because God, once we return to Him with a contrite heart, is able to cause good to spring forth, if only to make us to grow in humility and to teach us to have a little less confidence in our own strength and a little more in Him alone.

So great is the mercy of the Lord that He uses our faults to our advantage! Ruysbroek, a Flemish mystic of the Middle Ages, has these words: “The Lord, in His clemency, wanted to turn our sins against themselves and in our favor; He found a way to render them useful, to convert them in our hands into instruments of salvation. This should in no way diminish our fear of sinning, nor our pain at having sinned. Rather, our sins have become for us a source of humility.” Let us add also that they can just as well become a source of tenderness and mercy toward others. I, who fall so easily, how can I permit myself to judge my brother? How can I not be merciful toward him, as the Lord has been toward me? Accordingly, after committing a fault of whatever kind, rather than withdrawing into ourselves indefinitely in discouragement and dwelling on the memory, we must immediately return to God with confidence and even thank Him for the good that His mercy will be able to draw out of this fault!

We must know that one of the weapons that the devil uses most commonly to prevent souls from advancing toward God is precisely to try to make them lose their peace and discourage them by the sight of their faults… Let us understand this: For the person of goodwill, that which is serious in sin is not so much the fault in itself as the despondency into which it places him. He who falls but immediately gets up has not lost much. He has rather gained in humility and in the experience of mercy.

We have been reflecting on Charity, the virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God. Our standard for charity towards those around us is God’s love. In fact, Christ explicitly gave us this standard, saying, “A new commandment I give you: love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34), that is, selflessly and sacrificially. Consequently, whether we have genuine charity for our neighbors depends on whether we’re willing to give selflessly and sacrificially for their sakes. Notice that Our Lord doesn’t offer this principle as advice, but as a commandment; we’re obliged to love selflessly and sacrificially. As Christians, we’re obliged to spend time with people we don’t enjoy, to be kind to our enemies, to give generously to the poor, to strive for reconciliation with estranged family members, and to show our affection for people we don’t get along with.

The Virtue of Charity means practicing the Works of Mercy, both bodily and spiritual. The seven corporeal works of mercy are those which care for the bodily wants of our brothers and sisters. They are: Feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, ransoming the captive, caring for the sick and imprisoned, and burying the dead. The chief opportunity for us to lend material aid to those in need is in giving alms; our financial donations are a critical aspect of fraternal charity, and a work pleasing to God.

The spiritual works of mercy are those which promote the welfare of souls. They are instructing, counseling, admonishing, comforting, praying for the living and the dead, forgiving willingly, and bearing wrongs patiently. While it is necessary to do all we can to ensure that all people have the basic physical necessities there is the CCC states “another hunger from which men are perishing: "Man does not live by bread alone, but . . . by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,"…There is a famine on earth, "not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD" (CCC 2835) People come to God through other people.  It is your responsibility to help your spouse, kids, and friends into a deep friendship with Jesus, and you will be held accountable for this just as we are held accountable to take care of the poor, first in our own families and then beyond. This is why it is so necessary and so fulfilling to cultivate a way life of Invitation, Hospitality, Friendship, Good Conversation and inviting others to Pray the Rosary with us.

So whom should you love? Christians are supposed to love everybody, but remember that virtue is ordered love, and there’s an order to our love of neighbor as well. When you’re prioritizing your love, the two main things to consider are a person’s need and relationship to you. After that, you go based on whatever other circumstances make you more closely connected to one person rather than another.

First we need to consider a person’s relationship to us. God has designed us to feel a greater affection for those nearest to us. We have a natural affection for our family, our friends, our coworkers. This phenomenon isn’t just some evolutionary, tribalistic, adaptive trait: it’s God’s way of encouraging us to love those around us, those with whom we’re likely to come into close contact. God doesn’t want us loving coldly, abstractly, at a distance: He wants us to love the people in front of us, with us in our lives. And so He makes it pleasing to love those to whom we’re more closely connected.

Second, consider helping others a source of joy. Because it gives joy, and it forces you to stop obsessing about your own issues, when you help people who are really in need.

If Charity is to do something for the happiness of someone else, then what would please God, what would make Him happy? What matters most to God is the salvation of souls. This is what motivated Him to become one of us, suffer and die: God loves souls and wants to save them. If we want to do something for God, something for the love of Him, then we should do all we can to help Him save souls. And there are many simple things we can do for the love of God and for the salvation of souls. Each morning in the Morning Offering I shared with you yesterday, we can offer up and unite our prayer, work, joy and suffering to Jesus to help Him save souls. In this way we become God’s fellow workers, as Paul says in 1 Cor 3:9. Did you do your morning offering today or is all that stuff going to be wasted?

The second way you can do something for the love and good of God and to make him happy is the be an apostle of friendship and the Rosary. The world is rampant with loneliness and a loss of meaning and purpose. What the world needs is: 1) Families helping families, people helping people, you help your own family,  2) Live the virtue of hospitality, friendship and the art of good conversation, 3) Have a consistent but flexible spiritual schedule and Invite others to join you, and 4) Ask the Holy Spirit for Wisdom, courage and humility.

Have a consistent but flexible spiritual schedule and invite others to join you. In the mid 90’s when my kids were very small I would begin each day praying the Rosary by myself. One day the Lord said to me clearly, ”Michael, if you pray the Rosary by yourself everyday, how will your wife and kids pray the Rosary? Change your schedule and invite them to pray it with you.” I changed, and since 1995 we have prayed the Rosary as family every night, no matter where we are or what we are doing. Xavier now lives with 4 buddies at KU and every night at 9, they pray the Rosary together. I don’t care what you do for your spiritual practices, that is up to you, but do something that is consistent with some flexibility, and then invite your wife, your kids or friends into it. For your personal family, there is the opportunity every night, or a few days a week. Try something once a week like a Sunday brunch or on a Sunday evening invite people over. But make it a consistent time and place and build a habit.

Live the virtue of hospitality, friendship and the art of good conversation. Stop making the phone, computer or tv the focus of your attention. Make God and other people the focus of your attention. Set up your house so that you can have an atmosphere of hospitality, friendship and good conversation in your kitchen, living room, deck, garage, by the pool – wherever. Invite people into this space, offer them something to drink or eat. Then be interested in their life. Ask them what they think about this or that; Ask them what they are listening to on podcast; ask them what their favorite band is currently or the last good movie or book? Ask them to share what they liked about it. Our world is dying for friendship and meaningful conversation. Be apostles of friendship and good conversation. Give the world what it needs.

Ask God for the supernatural gifts of wisdom and courage. Then pay attention to whatever God inspires in your heart and then take action. If you ask, ask with the confidence God answers and when inspirations come, do not ignore them, act on them God planted a desire in my heart. Here we are, 13 months and about 3500 people a day praying the Rosary. Then I felt inspired to take it on the Road. I threw the idea out there and here I am at someone’s house 3-4 times a week. Have the courage and the humility to start. God can work with something. But if you are unwilling to start, to take action, then God has nothing to work with. If you do nothing, then God can do nothing through you.

There are, St. Augustine tells us, two basic alternatives in this life: either we can love self to the point of forgetting God, or we can love God to the point of forgetting ourselves. The first choice results in the self-exclusion of heaven otherwise known as hell; the second – Heaven and eternal joy. How could a person choose hell? I mentioned this the other day but I want to build on it - Because of Original Sin we have a fallen human nature. Now, instead of our passions or feelings propelling us toward good and away from evil they do just the opposite – we have a strong attraction to sin and an aversion for the things of God. This condition puts us in great danger. God will not force us to choose him. We must freely choose friendship with him. But in our fallen state, we have this aversion to the things of God and are drawn to sin. If we do not reverse this trend it will grow stronger until death, at which time we will still have an aversion to Him and reject Him. This is why we need to practice the virtue of Charity – the virtue of choosing God for God’s sake.

There is a powerful Image of our Particular Judgment from CS Lewis book The Last Battle. Aslan the Lion, the who represents Jesus Christ, comes to Judge all the creatures of Narnia. Behind him stood all the stars so that Aslan’s huge black shadow streamed away to his left. As the creatures came rushing on, they came right up to Aslan. One of two things happened to each of them. They all looked straight in his face, and when some looked, the expression of their faces changed terribly. For some, it was fear and hatred.  They did not find in Aslan what they wanted. They swerved to His left and disappeared into His huge black shadow – an image of hell. But the others looked in the face of Aslan and loved him. They found in Aslan what they had always wanted loved and sought. All these swerved to His right, into the light of Heaven. If at death the soul has spent its life seeking and choosing God, loving God, then it gets what it wanted – union with God in heaven.. On the other hand, if a soul has spent its life choosing itself over and against God and neighbor, then at death it gets what it wanted: Itself and that is All! (That is Hell). 

As we said before, there are two basic alternatives in this life: either we can love self to the point of forgetting God, or we can love God to the point of forgetting ourselves. We want, therefore, to build the habit of loving God to the point of forgetting ourselves - this is the virtue of Charity

Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.

With charity, we are saying to God, I love you; I want your good; I want to do something for you Lord. Jesus I want to offer you a gift. Now this may sound crazy because what can you give God that he does not already have? Well, there is something he does not already have fully – and that is you. God is waiting for you to give yourself totally to him.

It is hard to do it all at once, so we can begin by making the habit of giving ourselves to him in little ways each day and this builds the habit of giving ourselves to him completely.

Begin each day with the Morning Offering by which we give to God our prayer, work, joy and suffering

“O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer You my prayers, works, joys and sufferings of this day for all the intentions of Your Sacred Heart, in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world, in reparation for my sins, for the intentions of all my relatives and friends, and in particular for the intentions of the Holy Father.” Amen.

Throughout the day renew the offering of our prayer, work, joy and suffering by saying, “Jesus I offer this to you; Jesus I accept that for the love of you.”

From the earliest days of the Church the faithful had the habit of praying a series of Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s and Glory Be’s. St. Dominic was is unique in the way he used the Rosary as a powerful tool of evangelization. The great Dominican theologian, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange writes: At the end of the 12th century southern France was ravaged by the Albigensian heresy – a heresy which denied the infinite goodness and power of God by admitting a principle of evil which was often victorious…It was at that moment that Our Blessed Lady made known to St. Dominic a kind of preaching till then unknown, which she said would be one of the most powerful weapons against future errors and in future difficulties. Under her inspiration, St Dominic went into the villages of the Albigensians, gathered the people, and preached to them the mysteries of salvation — the Incarnation, the redemption, eternal life. As Mary had taught him to do, he distinguished the different kinds of mysteries, and after each short instruction, he had ten Hail Mary’s recited… And what the word of the preacher was unable to do, the sweet prayer of the Hail Mary did for hearts. As Mary promised, it proved to be a most fruitful form of preaching.

St. Dominic went into villages, gathered people, shared with them the teachings of Jesus. After each short instruction, he had ten Hail Mary’s recited. And what the word of the preacher was unable to do, the sweet prayer of the Hail Mary did for hearts. As Mary promised, it proved to be a most fruitful form of preaching. Furthermore, Mary said this method would be one of the most powerful weapons against future errors and in future difficulties. Well we face many errors spread by the devil through the world and we face many difficulties. Maybe Our Lady is calling us to use the same method, and by accident or inspiration, that is exactly what we are doing. We invite family and friends to join us in our homes, offer hospitality, a meal, drinks, coffee, dessert, we engage in good conversation, and then we invite them to pray the Rosary with us. But we pray the Rosary in a new way that is actually a really old way – introduced by St. Dominic of sharing a short teaching from the Word of God, the teaching of Jesus, and then we pray one decade of the Rosary – and we do this five times, and then the conversation can continue by asking one another what struck us during the meditations. So you can listen to the audio Rosary I send out or you can print the short teaching, read it aloud and pray the decades in between each teaching. Whatever you like. It worked for St. Dominic and Our Lady promised it would work in the future.

St. John Paul II in his letter on the Rosary writes: The Rosary is also a path of proclamation and increasing knowledge, in which the mystery of Christ is presented again and again at different levels of the Christian experience. Its form is that of a prayerful and contemplative presentation, capable of forming Christians according to the heart of Christ. When the recitation of the Rosary combines all the elements needed for an effective meditation, (especially when family and friends are gathered together), it can present a significant catechetical opportunity which we should use to advantage. In this way too Our Lady of the Rosary continues her work of proclaiming Christ. The history of the Rosary shows how this prayer was used in particular by the Dominicans at a difficult time for the Church due to the spread of heresy. Today we are facing new challenges. Why should we not once more have recourse to the Rosary, with the same faith as those who have gone before us? The Rosary retains all its power and continues to be a valuable resource for every good evangelizer.

Padre Pio said: "Love the Madonna and pray the Rosary."

What prevents us from perfect Joy is Self-Reliance. When everything is going well, when we have it all under control, and there is no major crisis, we fall into the bad habit of self-reliance. We think, "I got this…" This is known as the deadly sin of Pride. 

Crisis. Then something happens which removes our apparent ability to control things Some examples include: Loss of health. loss of a spouse, problems at work, in marriage, or with a kid. This crisis can leave us dazed and bewildered.  We can’t make sense out of it. We can’t control or solve the problem, and everything is dark. We become lost and paralyzed. We experience anger, fear, sorrow and even despair – these are normal human emotions. 

So we have to assess and weigh options. We try to understand what is going on, then make a plan to solve the problem. It is normal to ask “What is going on? Why is this happening?” Ultimately there are two options:

Option 1: Chaos and Despair Everything that happens is the result of billions of humans making free choices, like everyone trying to drive through an intersection at once with no lights, and random chaotic forces in nature. In the end it is all just chaos. The world and my life are governed by nothing but random chaos: We come from chaos, our lives are full of chaos, and we descend back to chaos after death. In response to chaos we can try to control everything, or despair from being overwhelmed by fear and anxiety which leads us to numb the fear and pain through distraction by means of entertainment, pot, alcohol, etc.

Option 2: Trust in the Providence of God: God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that is visible and Invisible. He orders all things for good (even the free, stupid and sinful decisions of men, even the apparently chaotic forces of nature). Romans 8:28 "We know that in everything God works for good for those who love him."

The constant witness of the saints confirms this truth:

In letter, John of the Cross writes: “Do not let what is happening to me…cause you any grief, for it does not cause me any…Men do not do these things, but God, who knows what is suitable for us and arranges things for our good. Think nothing else but that God ordains all, and where there is no love, put love, and you will draw love out… Letter 26

St. Catherine of Siena said to "those who are scandalized and rebel against what happens to them": "Everything comes from love, all is ordained for the salvation of man, God does nothing without this goal in mind."

St. Thomas More, shortly before his martyrdom, consoled his daughter: "Nothing can come but that that God wills. And I make me very sure that whatsoever that be, seem it never so bad in sight, it shall indeed be the best."

Dame Julian of Norwich: "Here I was taught by the grace of God that I should steadfastly keep me in the faith... and that at the same time I should take my stand on and earnestly believe in what our Lord shewed in this time - that 'all manner [of] thing shall be well.'"

Our Response to the Providence of God: Faith, surrender, and to rest in the providence of God. John of the Cross encourages us to view all the struggles and difficulties of life as coming from the hand of God, for the persons good. 

This is the Remedy to all our problems: Be responsible, and do things to change your situation for the better. But don't fall into the trap of self-reliance or control. Instead, turn to Jesus and Mary in prayer. Give thanks for every moment, and live in the present. Abandon all future moments to God, since you cannot predict them. And lastly, pray the Rosary constantly. 

We must begin with the distinction between hope and charity because I have hope and very little charity. Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of Heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the Holy Spirit.

Hope is the desire for one’s own happiness. And since nothing in this world is perfect, lasting or enough, then our hope is the proper love of self that motivates us to do what we need to achieve perfect and lasting happiness through union with God and heaven.

Hope as the desire for happiness propels us to get rid of our vice and sin which destroys union with God, and practice virtue, spend time in prayer, receive the sacraments, learn what Jesus revealed through Scripture and Tradition and so on…so that we can reach union with God.

With hope I want my good, my happiness and so I stop doing the things that destroy happiness (sin) and I make a habit out of those things that bring lasting happiness. With hope I desire my own happiness.

Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God. With hope I want my good, my happiness. Charity is based on wanting the good, the happiness of someone else.

With Hope I say, “I want my good.” With charity I say, “I want your good.” Italians have a beautiful way of saying I love you, they say “Ti voglio bene.” I want your good. In the theological virtue of charity, we are saying to God, I love you; I want your good; I want to do something to make you happy O Lord. I am good about desiring and striving after my own happiness. I am bad at charity. I rarely think of doing something just for the good or the happiness of God.

Since I don’t think about the love of God as much as I should maybe we should begin with basics. The first way we can love God is by keeping the commandments. Jesus said If you love me you will keep my commandments. John 14:15 But Jesus knows the 10 are just an outline of the complexity of life so he went on to say in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:21)

It is pretty easy to keep the broad strokes of the 10 Commandments. How are we doing on the finer points? Are we loving God when it comes to pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, lust, gossip, judgmental thoughts and words, what we consider small lies, drunkenness, pornography? If we want to be clear on how to love God, we should read paragraphs 2083-2557 of the CCC.

In 1 Cor 13:4 Paul gives us a good short list of what we should do to love God: Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.

You are God's chosen race, his saints; he loves you, and you should be clothed in sincere compassion, in kindness and humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with one another; forgive each other as soon as a quarrel begins. The Lord has forgiven you; now you must do the same. Over all these…, to keep them together and complete them, put on love. And may the peace of Christ reign in your hearts, because it is for this that you were called together as parts of one body. Always be thankful. (Galatians 3:12) 

Today and tomorrow we will reflect on the virtue of Charity because I do not understand it at all; even more, I don’t live charity toward God and neighbor. So here we go. The two chief characteristics of God’s love are selflessness and sacrifice.  Consequently, in the virtue of Charity, our love must embody these two attributes. Of course, the fact that we must be selfless does not imply that we can never consider our own needs and desires. The virtue of hope is founded on fulfilling one’s own need: “I want to get to Heaven; I need to get to Heaven.” Hope is the desire for supernatural good insofar as it will make oneself happy. This is totally appropriate, but it also needs to be complemented by charity, which is the desire for supernatural good insofar as it’s something that’ll make God and neighbor happy.

To have a proper understanding of selflessness, we need to first distinguish between two kinds of love. Love itself can be a difficult idea to get a handle on, given how many kinds there are and how often we use the word “love” with no reflection on its precise significance. The broadest definition of love is: To want some good for someone. Pretty much every time someone uses the word “love” it involves a movement towards some good thing for some person. But there are two ways to want some good for someone. The first way is wanting some good for yourself. Phrases like “I love coffee,” “I love the mountains,” “I love the Kansas City Chiefs,” all describe this first kind of love. It’s based on wanting one’s own happiness. But there’s another kind of love which involves wanting some good for someone else. So, for example, if I were to say, “I love my son; I’d do anything for him,” it would indicate that what I desire is for my son to be happy. Examples of this second love are the way all parents are supposed to love their children, the way Mother Teresa loved the poor, or the way we should all love our enemies. It doesn’t refer to concern for our own enjoyment, but rather a willingness to work for someone else’s fulfillment.

Again, these two loves, the first of which is self-focused and the second of which is other-focused, are complementary. Ideally, one should experience both. Consider the love between a husband and wife. When the man says, “I love you,” to the woman, he normally means a) “You make me happy,” and b) “I will try to make you happy.” If, on the other hand, all love were to be reduced to the first kind of statement, that is, to self-focused love, then the love doesn’t mean very much, and it’ll eventually collapse just as soon as one of the parties doesn’t feel like he’s getting anything out of the relationship.

Living out Charity always demands sacrifice. If you’ve ever made someone else’s happiness a priority, you know it isn’t easy.  In fact, the proof of charity is measured by sacrifice. If we have a selfless love for God and neighbor, we’ll be willing to suffer in order to serve them. That’s the ultimate test of love, as Our Lord Himself states, “No one has greater love than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

What does all this mean practically?  How can we concretely practice a selfless and sacrificial love?  Well, the first step is to stop thinking about our faith, our religion, and our lives as Catholics as if it was just about us. We have to keep in mind that our number-one purpose in life is to serve God, to please Him. So we shouldn’t evaluate our spiritual life based on whether we get anything out of it. Many people do this; they quit praying, or going to confession, or going to mass, because “it wasn’t doing anything for them.” That’s an indication that they’re lacking the virtue of charity, that their relationship with God is fundamentally selfish.

We have reflected on the three powers of the soul: the intellect, will and passions. The passions are the God-given desires, feelings, or emotions designed to propel us toward what is good and away from what is evil. There are eleven fundamental passions: Love, desire, joy, hate, aversion, sorrow, hope, despair, fear, courage and anger. Because of Original Sin we have a fallen human nature. Now, instead of our feelings and desires propelling us toward good and away from evil they do just the opposite – we have a strong attraction to sin and an aversion, a dislike for the things of God. This is one reason it is so hard to spend time in prayer and we would almost like to do anything else. This condition puts us in great danger. God will not force us to choose him. We must freely choose friendship with him. But in our fallen state, we have this aversion to the things of God and a strong attraction to sin. If we do not reverse this trend it will grow stronger until we see God at death, at which time we still have an aversion to Him, and we might reject Him. Well, how could someone see God and not want him? The rich young man in Matthew 19, the Samaritan Village in Luke 9 and the Pharisees upon seeing with their own eyes Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, all rejected Him. Why? Because they had the habit of an aversion for the things of God and a stronger attraction to sinful things of this world. Vice is to be attracted to sin and an aversion to good, to the things of God. Virtue is the habit of being attracted to good and an aversion to evil. So how do we change our vice to virtue – that is the point to today’s meditation.

So how do you get virtue? How do you get your feelings to pull you the right way? There are two complementary techniques: The first is resisting misdirected feelings. This is sometimes called checking the passions, or, more commonly, “fake it till you make it.” If you do the right thing, over and over, eventually your urges will get in line. Most people don’t start out liking exercise, but if they keep at it they begin to look forward to their morning run. People usually don’t start out enjoying prayer, but if they pray anyway, day after day, they get to the point where they can’t do without it. The same goes for abstaining from bad behavior you’re inclined to: if you have a habitually dirty mouth, you’ll want to say horrible things when you get angry – but if you resist that urge long enough, you’ll get to the point where you’re accustomed to clean speech, and where you hate the sound of profanity and vulgarity.

The second technique is to mentally focus on pleasing aspect of what's good and displeasing aspects of what's bad. This is sometimes called commanding the passions. You can use St. James’ image, about how a small flame – unworthy talk – can burn down a whole forest of good. Whatever image works to help you realize how deadly gossip is, use that, focus on that, picture that. And eventually your desire to gossip will wane.

In any case what you want to remember is that your emotions are, to some degree, under your control. They are voluntary “either from being commanded by the will, or from not being checked by the will.” So it doesn’t work to just say, “Well, that’s just the way I feel,” or “There’s nothing I can do about how I feel.” The whole point of virtue is that there is something you can do about how you feel, which means you can come to delight in both the fruits and the process of acting well.

Then read, reflect, and resolve. If you practice meditation and a resolution every day, you will grow in your desire for God and the habit of choosing Him. If you don’t, you will grow in your aversion for God and you will choose sin and reject God. Now you choose!

The connection between joy and the commandments is counter-intuitive to many people in modern culture. And yet that connection is laid out plainly in the Scriptures. The very first Psalm describes the just man as one to whom God’s law is delightful: “the law of the Lord is his joy he finds pleasure in the Law of God” (Psalm 1:2). Not his “obligation,” but his joy. Christ Himself reaffirms this connection for His disciples: “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete” (John 15:10-11). Why is the commandment of the Lord a source of joy? Because joy comes from fulfilling our design, and God’s commandment reveals our design.

When my children were somewhere between one and two years old, they all developed a taste for the woodchips that cover the ground at most of the local playgrounds. Whenever I caught them putting a woodchip in their mouth, I take it away and say, “Don’t eat that.” That’s my law: don’t eat woodchips. Of course, they didn’t get it, and thought I was being mean. But that’s just because they didn’t understand their own internal structure as well as I do. I knew they would get more pleasure, more delight, from not choking to death or trying to digest a massive splinter. And my law, even if they didn’t’ realize it, expressed the way they are made and the way to be happy. So it’s no surprise to me that God’s first law to His children in the Garden of Eden was, “Don’t eat that; it could kill you.” And it’s no surprise that they didn’t understand, and disobeyed, and that the disobedience made them miserable. Because there’s an intrinsic relationship between a) God’s commandments; b) human design; and c) joy.

Let me give one more example: The Church, reflecting on the nature of human sexuality, understands that our design is such that marriage, sex and babies must go together and in that order. Furthermore, the sexual union of the spouses and their fertility must not be ripped apart. The self-gift of sexuality will be distorted and frustrated if we deliberately do something to rip fertility out of the act. This is a truth of our design, and it can be expressed in a commandment: contraception is immoral. Not owing to my own intelligence or virtue, but thanks to a good friend who gave me a book on the Churches teaching on Marriage and contraception, and because I have faith in Christ and His Church, we never used contraception in our marriage. And I can honestly say that my kids have probably given me as much joy as anything else in my life. Which means that now, I don’t just understand or obey the commandment – I rejoice in it. The Church’s law on contraception has been a source of joy. Again, the main point: God’s commandment expresses our design, and acting according to our design gives lasting, permanent joy.

The goal isn’t just to experience joy as an outcome of following God’s law, but to experience joy in the process of following God’s law. And the only way that happens is when you have virtue. Consider an example of growing in excellence and delight precisely by being docile to instructions that may not seem to make much sense at first: learning to play piano. When you start to take piano lessons, the whole thing feels artificial and restrictive. You have to hold your hands a certain way, repeat unpleasant-sounding scales over and over, learn how to correlate little black dots with letters with the keys, etc... None of it feels related to what you want to do on the piano, which is just play music you like. But if you stick with it, if you submit to “the rules” of music and piano training, one day you might wake up and find yourself an artist.

Many of you know I have been suffering for 41/2 years an unexplainable muscular skeletal issue that affects my breathing. Today, I am worn out with it. So I have been reflecting on my need for the virtue of patience. The virtue of patience enables us to bear physical and moral sufferings without being overwhelmed by sorrow. If we suffer well our reward in heaven will immeasurably surpass the pain in this life but we may be in danger of losing our reward because we fail to exercise the virtue of patience. In fact, we suffer even more than we would have, because we don’t conform our will to the will of God. Patience harnesses the emotions of anger and sorrow to help us take advantage of the good of suffering that purifies us of disordered attachments, increases our Faith, Hope and Love which is our capacity to receive the life of God, and leverage our suffering to help save souls and change world events. Paul writes in Col. 1:24 I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake. And in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.

5 reasons to practice the virtue of patience:

1. Patience helps us conform our will to the loving will of God, who knows better than we the things that are good for us and therefore sometimes sends us suffering and tribulation.

2. The recollection of the suffering of Jesus and Mary, incomparable models of patience, and the sincere desire to imitate them.

3. The necessity of making reparation for our sins by the voluntary and virtuous acceptance of suffering in atonement for our sins.

4. To respond to the invitation of Jesus to help him save souls and change world events for good by uniting our suffering to His as Paul said in Col. 1:24

5. The prospect of an eternity of happiness that awaits us if we know how to suffer in patience. The suffering passes, but the fruit of having sanctified our suffering will never pass.

5 Degrees of Patience:

1. Resignation without complaint or impatience to the crosses God sends us or permits to come to us.

2. Peace and serenity in the face of affliction, without any of the sadness or melancholy that accompanies mere resignation.

3. Acceptance of one’s cross for the love of God and to help save souls

4. Complete and total joy, which leads one to give thanks to God for being associated with him in the mystery of the Cross.

5. The folly of the Cross, which prefers suffering to pleasure and places all one’s delight in external suffering by which one is configured to Christ. As St. Teresa of Avila used to say: “To suffer or to die.”

5 Ways to Grow in Patience:

1. Constantly beg God for the gift of patience. 

2. Foresee the difficulties we shall encounter on the path of virtue. St. Thomas recommends this practice to all Christians, and especially to those who have not yet acquired the habit of working with fortitude. In this way one gradually overcomes one's fear, and when difficulties actually arise, one will overcome them much more easily because one has anticipated them.

3. Accept with a generous spirit the little annoyances of daily life.

4.  Meditate frequently on the passion and death of Christ.

5.  You can do anything for the one you love so if you want to be better at bearing suffering then increase your love for God and accept your suffering as a way to love Him more.

To be be Cheerful or Joyful in suffering is a necessary requirement of Patience. We must preserve cheerfulness and serenity in trial. It’s not enough to endure - we must endure cheerfully.

Joy is the response to something experienced as good, and it invites rest in that good. The final piece of knowledge we need for real joy is self-knowledge, namely, the knowledge that can provide the foundation for humility. In Joseph Pieper’s words, “Humility is man’s estimation of himself according to truth. And that is almost all there is to it.”

Joy depends on our knowing the truth about ourselves, I think, for at least four reasons. Knowing who and what we are is helps us to: a) cultivate gratitude; b) not think about ourselves too much; c) appreciate the magnificence of other things; d) resist the urge to feel as though our salvation depends upon ourselves.

First, gratitude. Gratitude and a sense of entitlement are diametrically opposed. Have you ever heard someone say “Thank you!” after his insistent demands have finally been met? It doesn’t sound like gratitude – it sounds more like “Well, it’s about time!” You’re not grateful for what you think you’re owed. Gratitude is due to what is given gratuitously. It’s not due to what you claim by right.

In fact, you don’t have any absolute rights. Not before God. Because in your native state, you don’t even exist. You’re a sliver of non-being that God took notice of and brought to life – and non-being has no claims on being. Remember Our Lord’s words to Catherine of Sienna: “Do you know, daughter, who you are, and who I am? If you know these two things you will be blessed. You are she who is not; whereas I am He who is.”

And not only are you absolutely dependent upon God for your existence, you are a sinner! Apart from God, you’re nothing, and then when God lets you participate in being, what do you do? You turn away from Him, you insult Him by preferring to slide back into evil and sin, the shameful non-being of privation. 

You aren't owed anything, so everything is a gift. 

That brings us to the second way self-knowledge causes joy: it encourages us not to think too much about ourselves. We aren’t a big deal, so we shouldn’t think a great deal about ourselves. Narcissism doesn’t just mean thinking a lot of oneself, it also means thinking about oneself a lot. That’s disproportionate to the truth – you should think the most about the most important things, and you yourself aren’t one of them. So humility doesn’t mean constant self-disparagement: as C.S. Lewis says, if you meet someone who’s really humble, you’ll notice that person “will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.” That’s as it should be. Satan wants us to think more about ourselves than about anything else, for the simple reason that it’s not good for us and it makes us miserable.

When you know you’re little, you appreciate the magnificence of other things, you refocus your attention on the grandeur of the world beyond yourself. Chesterton tells the story of two boys: one became a titanic giant and the other became as small as a grasshopper. The one who became a giant became bored with everything – the wonders of the world were all toy-sized and unimpressive. The one who became tiny was able to have astonishing adventures everywhere. He appreciated everything, now that he saw how big and rich it all was, but to do that he had to become small first.

Humility is simply a sense of scale, and because you no longer dominate every scene, you can appreciate things for what they are. But it also takes the pressure off.You’re not in control, you’re not the major mover in the universe. God is. Which also means you can take peace in leaving your very salvation up to him.

This was the secret of St. Philip Neri, one of the most famously joyful of all the saints. It’s recorded that one time he gave a very delightful illustration of how to be miserable and how to be happy:

Thomas Aquinas wrote that the greatest of all pleasures consists in the contemplation of truth. Now every pleasure assuages pain as stated above: hence the contemplation of truth assuages pain or sorrow, and the more so the more perfectly one is a lover of wisdom. And therefore in the midst of tribulations men rejoice in the contemplation of Divine things and of future Happiness.

So the act of careful reflection on ultimate truth is pleasing, and the truth God has revealed enhances that pleasure immeasurably. Furthermore, the only adequate response to a consideration of the goodness of God, and to His boundless extravagance towards us is gratitude.

Gratitude can refer either to a feeling of appreciation or to a display towards our benefactor – and where the display is absent the feeling will quickly evaporate. In other words, when you stop saying “thank you,” your pleasure in the things you’ve been given won’t last.

What have you been given? Well, of course, there’s what we all have in common: goods of the body (life, food, clean water, a roof over your head, safety and security); goods of the mind (friends and books and music and memory); and goods of the spirit (you have God’s divine life dwelling within you making you truly a son or daughter of God, a partaker in the divine nature, you have a knowledge of the Father’s love, and the prospect of heaven). God gave all this freely – some of it cost Him a slow, torturous death – just so we could enjoy it.

But here’s a first suggestion for cultivating gratitude: make your own list. Many of us, when we hear the phrase “count your blessings,” count like a toddler – we maybe thank God for three or four things, and then we quit. Try this instead: take half an hour and a pen and a piece of paper and write down the top twenty or thirty things you’re most grateful for. Then hang on to that list for a while. Keep it in your purse, or your pocket. I’ve done this with a lot of groups, and I always find it makes a complaining or self-pitying attitude much harder to justify throughout the day.

Since we tend not to be grateful, we don’t acknowledge our gifts or say “thank you.” This is, according to Aquinas, a failure in justice: we owe God an explicit recognition of His divine generosity. So why do we fail? What are the primary sources of ingratitude?

I think the obstacles to habitual thankfulness can be categorized under two headings: a) dissatisfaction with our spiritual condition; b) dissatisfaction with our worldly condition.

Dissatisfaction with our spiritual condition. Of course, in one respect, dissatisfaction with our spiritual condition might be interpreted as the proper guard against self-complacency. We do have a lot of work to do in getting rid of vice and being more conformed to Christ, and there’s no sense denying it. On the other hand, focus on our own faults can easily become so consuming that it prevents a more primordial awareness of how much the Lord has done for us – and for the world – already.

Dissatisfaction with our worldly condition. If we’re always looking for more money or more health or more security or more praise, we won’t be grateful. If we say “I just need to make it through today, or to the weekend, or the end of the semester, or the next couple years” or “I just need to get a job, or a house, or make it to retirement” or “I just need to get the kids to bed, or get the kids ready for school, or get the kids to college, or get the kids through college,” – as though achieving any of those things would bring us peace and contentment, we won’t be grateful.

Let me suggest two practices for growing in gratitude and happiness.

First, the greatest way to thank God is to go to Mass and receive the Eucharist. Eucharist literally means a sacrifice of Thanksgiving. Second, begin your day by thanking God in prayer. 

Joy is the God-given passion or emotion that prompts us to rest in the good. After I climb the mountain, I want to rest on the summit and take in the beauty of 360-degree view that, makes me realize life is bigger and better than all my projects and problems. This allows me to celebrate reality. Then I can peacefully walk back down the mountain and say, “Life is good.” What do you like to do that makes you realize life is bigger and better than your projects problems, that thing from which you walk away you say, “Life is good?” What do you delight in and how often do you partake of that activity?   If we refuse to rest, or if we’re incapable of it, joy or delight will be frustrated. If when I got to the top of the mountain I did not sit down and take in the view but immediately trudged off back down the mountain, never raising my eyes to see the glorious vistas but set off to find another summit – then I’ve missed the whole point – the goal, which is to delight to have joy in the good, to rest in the good. Where did we get this attachment to busyness and work? Why the incapacity, the almost pathological fear of rest and the insensitivity to the joys of existential celebration? Joseph Pieper suggests celebrating being entails a celebration of one’s own being. But, you can’t rest in the goodness of existence unless you’re convinced that it’s good that you exist, that you are good.  The need for someway to affirm our goodness, our existential validation is universal. Again from Pieper: “What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit confirmation: It is good that you exist; how wonderful that you are!” One way or another, everyone needs to be convinced that it’s good that they exist. If they think the goodness of their being is in doubt, they will attempt to compensate by the goodness of what they do. But when self-validation is based on doing, not being, the only way to justify oneself is by ceaseless activity.      If you’re standing on the solid ground of existential goodness, you can simply rest there. But for a lot of folks the only thing between them and the bottomless void of worthlessness is the net woven of their own achievements. And those cords keep fraying and snapping, their achievements keep getting obsolete and wearing out, which means they must be constantly tending to that net, fixing up the old ropes and adding new ones. They have to make themselves matter, all the time. The most arrogant, self-promoting person you know is desperately trying to save his own existence from slipping into the dark night of irrelevance. That person can’t rest. That person can’t celebrate being. And self-validation doesn’t work anyway. We don’t know enough about a) our own character and b) the grand scheme of things to know whether, in the big picture, in the long run, it’s good that we exist. Only God knows enough about us and about everything else to give us that assurance. Only the one who gave us existence can validate our existence. This is where the doctrine of God’s Fatherhood becomes so consoling. Our Lord’s joy is the model for all Christian joy, and it is based totally on the relationship with the Father: “If Jesus radiates such assurance, such happiness, such availability, it is by reason of the inexpressible love by which He knows that He is loved by His Father.” And a Father’s love isn’t based on doing, but on being. It’s not dependent on performance, but on existence. I don’t love my sons or daughters because they are high-performance kids, I love them because they are my kids. I take joy in them not because of what they does, but because of what they are. My delight in them doesn’t depend on their productivity (good thing too, since the only thing they produced early on was vomit and excrement (what comes out of his body)).   God’s love for us is the same way. It is not earned. That’s why we call it gratuitous. Baptism, the sacrament that makes us children of God.

A sobering article entitled Death by Loneliness documented that people are committing suicide and mass murders at an alarming rate because people are missing four essential ingredients to happiness: Family, friends, relationship with God that also gives meaning and purpose to suffering and finally, meaningful work. Meaningful work and a sense of achievement are vital to happiness. But production and achievement alone are insufficient. We also need joy, we need to delight in, rest in the work we have done. I love an arduous hike through the woods and up the mountain. But I am frustrated if I can’t get above tree-line, reach the summit and delight or rest in the 360-degree view that makes me realize, life is bigger than my projects or problems – life is really good. To be happy we need both the arduous work and the rest or the delight in the accomplishment of the work. In todays meditation we focus on joy and delight.  The power of the soul called the Passions are the good God-given emotions or desires designed to propel us toward good and away from evil. There are 11 fundamental passions: Love, Desire, Joy, Hate, Aversion, Sorrow, Hope, Despair, Fear, Courage, Anger. All the passions except one, prompt us to move. The single exception is joy. Joy may motivate action by its absence – when once you’ve tasted joy, you’ll do an awful lot to get it back again – but when joy is present its only demand is that you rest. Joy is the response to something experienced as good, and it invites repose in that good. We are missing out if we do not learn to delight or rest in a job well-done. We were made for joy, not for sorrow. We have the capacity for delight so that we can rest in the good, and perfect rest in the perfect good – perfect delight – is the ultimate purpose of human existence. Heaven, the ultimate joy, is also described by the fourth chapter of Hebrews as simply entering into God’s rest. So if you can’t rest, how are you going to enter heaven?   The Discipline of Rest. What makes joy distinctive is that it prompts us to rest in the good. If we refuse to rest, or if we’re incapable of it, delight will be frustrated. Rest and joy go together. The first condition for delight is rest. St. Paul VI, in his exhortation on Christian Joy, worries that for many, “The burden of their charges, in a fast-moving world, too often prevents them from enjoying daily joys.” When there’s so much to do, so much to get done, people run the risk of failing in the core responsibility of delight. Rest and joy are an obligation, specified in the third commandment. Apparently rest is so foreign, so unlikely for human beings to pursue on their own, that God needs to give us a direct order to take some time every week and prepare for heaven by resting with Him. If left to themselves, people will prefer the merciless yoke of productivity to the joy of the Lord.  The Sabbath frees us from that yoke, it reminds us that we were made for God’s delight and not for work’s anxiety. “Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). The Catechism beautifully describes the Sabbath as “a day of protest against the servility of work.”  Isn’t that beautiful? If you can’t say no to work, then you are a slave. Resting on Sunday is a revolution, it’s a weekly overthrow of the usurping tyrant of getting stuff done. Like sorrow, work is good in itself, and part of the human condition. But in the long run, our final purpose isn’t for sorrow, and it isn’t for work. We were made for rest and delight. In the book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper says, we should treat rest and joy, not work, as the goal of life. Many people treat Sunday just as a “recharging the batteries,” or getting “reenergized.” As though spending time with God, thinking about Him and delighting in all He has done, were just a kind of fueling up so that we could get back to the “real business” of life!

Our Lady is calling us to a greater quality and quantity of prayer. I have been encouraging you to spend more time in silence and solitude with Jesus in prayer. So what do you think people give as the number one reason for not spending time in prayer? They are too busy. We all think we are too busy… CCC 2742 We have not been commanded to work, to keep watch and to fast constantly, but it has been laid down that we are to pray without ceasing. Evagrius (cf. 1 Thess. 5:17)  I do not believe we lack time for prayer because we lack love for God. I think the real culprit is that we have been addicted to the routines of our life and these just need to be broken to create new routines and habits.  Luke 5:12-16 Jesus was not too busy to pray  While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy; and when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and besought him, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And he stretched out his hand, and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him. And he charged him to tell no one; but “go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to the people.” But so much the more the report went abroad concerning him; and great multitudes gathered to hear and to be healed of their infirmities. But he withdrew to the wilderness and prayed. Jesus had the power to heal any disease – people flooded him with requests – healing people of horrible diseases is important stuff – Jesus was really busy with all these sick people – but He was not too busy to pray. In the face of all this need – he withdrew to the wilderness and prayed.  Jesus spent time in deep friendship, relationship with His Father in prayer because he built the habit, the routine of prayer.  Mark 1:35 In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. Peter and his companions set out in search of him, and when they found him they said, 'Everybody is looking for you'. Matthew 14, After Jesus fed the 5000 with the multiplication of the loaves, Directly after this he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side while he would send the crowds away. After sending the crowds away he went up into the hills by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, Luke 22:39 After the Last Supper, Jesus left to make his way as usual to the Mount of Olives, to pray. Notice, Scripture points out, Jesus went to pray, as usual, as was his custom, this was his habit or routine.  Jesus had a deep friendship with His Father because he had the habit, the routine of prayer. Beginning and ending each day in prayer was his way of life. We will not reach deep friendship with God in prayer until we establish the habit, the routine of prayer – it’s all about our routines.  I know you want a deeper friendship with God, and you know friendship takes time. Yet you probably find yourself almost powerless to make the change. What’s the problem, are you just weak? Do you have no will power? Will-power just means the ability to form routines. The routines we form consciously or unconsciously we can carry out. These routines over time become so powerful they become addictions. There is an old saying, make good habits and become slaves of them. We become slaves to all habits, good or bad. The sub-conscious is powerful. The subconscious is simply habits we have formed into routines of thinking and living. We have built routines in our lives and those routines are so powerful they make us addicts. If we want to make some change, then we must make a break in our ritual, in our routine. We just need to make one change in our daily ritual to change our routine and begin to form new habits to spend more time in friendship with God in prayer. What daily rituals prevent you from spending more time in prayer? What can you do to break one of those rituals and begin anew?

In every approved apparition from the Miraculous Medal to the reported apparitions of Medjugorje, Jesus and Mary have called us to help them save souls and to change world events by our prayer and suffering. Yesterday, the mission to pray; today, suffering.  The Mission of Jesus was to save souls by suffering. We are invited to share in the same mission, to take up our cross daily and follow him.  Recently a wise friend of mine reminded me that my mission was to teach and to suffer. That caught me off-guard, but it is true. I should not forget or reject this aspect of my mission. An essential part of our mission as a Christian is to save other souls and alter world events by our suffering. The greatest good we can do is through our suffering united to Christ and that is what gives meaning and purpose to suffering!

I believe Jesus wants us to help him save souls by our suffering. But I don’t like it. And I am tempted to doubt this truth and fall into the temptation that my suffering is random and senseless. There is no reason for my suffering – it just is. Since there is no reason for my suffering then there is no meaning or purpose to my suffering. If the origin of my suffering is random and senseless then there is no meaning or purpose to it. Oh sure, it can make me stronger if I respond in the right way, but the suffering can be so great and last so long that if there is no meaning or purpose to it, eventually it overcomes a person. You can overcome anything if there is a strong enough reason to endure; but if there is no reason, no meaning or purpose, then we cannot endure. This is one of the most important questions that must be answered by every human – what is the meaning and purpose of my suffering?

Jesus Christ is the only one who gives meaning and purpose to suffering and the Catholic Church hands down this meaning. No other philosophy or religion answers the question adequately – and that is why so many people are lost, atheist, depressed, commit suicide or mass murders…they do not have a way to make sense out of suffering. We do. Christ has given us the answer.

Jesus brought into His suffering all the suffering that would every be in the world, from the beginning to the end of time. He transformed it and gave it meaning and purpose – to save souls. This gives our suffering a meaning - to save souls.

Jesus gave a creative character, a creative meaning to our suffering. If we accept and unite our suffering to His, then He uses it to recreate souls, that is, to save souls from sin and hell and to save the world from self-destruction. Jesus is counting on us not to waste our suffering. Don’t waste it – leverage it. What you did not choose, do not like and cannot change, accept with trust and offer with love to save souls.

The sufferings of Christ created the good of the world's redemption. This good in itself is inexhaustible and infinite. No man can add anything to it. But at the same time, in the mystery of the Church as his Body, Christ has in a sense opened his own redemptive suffering to all human suffering. In so far as man becomes a sharer in Christ's sufferings—in any part of the world and at any time in history—to that extent he in his own way completes the suffering through which Christ accomplished the Redemption of the world.

A young blind woman name Tina was recently hit by a truck walking through an intersection. Miraculously she survived. She has endured multiple reconstructive surgeries. Yesterday she awoke and said three words: Suffering for souls.

We offer this Rosary for the recovery of Tina!

I want to announce that we are implementing the option to make a donation at the bottom of this email. Our mission is to deliver meaning, hope, and happiness through deep friendship with Jesus and others. Help us develop tools to bring the audio Rosary to a million people by the end of 2025!

Yesterday, September 2, 2019, Our Lady is reported to have given this message at Medjugorje: Dear children, pray! Pray the Rosary every day—that wreath of flowers which, as a mother, directly connects me with your pains, sufferings, desires, and hopes. Apostles of my love, I am with you through the grace and the love of my Son, and I am asking for prayers of you. The world is in such need of your prayers for souls to be converted. With complete trust, open your hearts to my Son, and in them He will inscribe the summary of His words—which is love. Live in an unbreakable connection with the Most Sacred Heart of my Son. My children, as a mother, I am telling you that it is high time for you to kneel before my Son to acknowledge Him as your God, the center of your life. Offer gifts to Him—that which He most loves—which is love towards neighbor, mercy, and pure hearts. Apostles of my love, many of my children still do not acknowledge my Son as their God; they have not yet come to know His love. But you, with your prayer pronounced from a pure and open heart, by the gifts which you offer to my Son, will make even the hardest hearts open. Apostles of my love, the strength of prayer pronounced from the heart—a powerful prayer full of love—changes the world. Therefore, my children: pray, pray, pray. I am with you. Thank you.”

This message at Medjugorje is similar to the August 19 message of Our Lady at Fatima: “Pray, pray very much, and make sacrifices for sinners; for many souls go to hell, because there are none to sacrifice themselves and pray for them.” The message of Our Lady at San Nicolas Argentina in the 1980s is also similar: "God's warning is over the world. Those who stay in the Lord have nothing to fear, but those who deny what comes from him do. Two-thirds of the world is lost and the other part must pray and make reparation for the Lord to take pity. The devil wants to have full domination over the earth. He wants to destroy. The earth is in great danger." Mary tells us, “The weapon that has the greatest influence on evil is to say the Rosary."

We need to pray the Rosary every day and to be Apostles of the Rosary. This is a good start, but Our Lady is urging us to go further into union with Jesus and to help him save souls by our deeper prayer. As a young priest, Angelo Comastri, who today is a cardinal archpriest of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, relates his first encounter and conversation with St. Mother Teresa: 

She gave me a Miraculous Medal, put it in my hand, and asked me, “For how much time do you pray each day?” I was astonished and a little embarrassed. Then, gathering my thoughts, I replied, “Mother, I celebrate Holy Mass each day, I pray the Breviary each day…I pray the rosary each day also and very gladly…” Mother Teresa, with her rough hands, clasped the rosary that she always had with her. Then she fixed on me her eyes, which were filled with light and love, and said: “That is not enough, my son! That is not enough, because love cannot be reduced to the indispensable minimum; love demands the maximum!” I did not understand Mother Teresa’s words right away, and, as though to justify myself, I replied, “Mother, I expected from you instead this question: What acts of charity do you do?” Suddenly Mother Teresa’s face became very serious again, and she said in a stern tone of voice: “Do you think that I could practice charity if I did not ask Jesus every day to fill my heart with his love? Do you think that I could go through the streets looking for the poor if Jesus did not communicate the fire of his charity to my heart?”…Enunciating each word, she added: “Read the Gospel attentively, and you will see that Jesus sacrificed even charity for prayer. And do you know why? To teach us that, without God, we are too poor to help the poor!” 

Rest with God in prayer. God wants to give you rest so that he can fill, transform, and heal you.

I want you to continue to respond to call of Mary to pray the Rosary every day. Through the Rosary the Holy Spirit and Mary will form Jesus within you. The Rosary is the School of Mary. The Rosary is also the greatest weapon to overcome evil and bring peace to our families and the world. Mary is the one who crushes the head of Satan and she will do so in our lives by the Rosary. At the same time I want to encourage you to deepen your friendship with God by spending more time with him in prayer; talking to him from the heart, listening to him by reading the Word of God and just being quiet and still with him. What prevents us from spending more time with Jesus in friendship are the 1000s desires and worries that vie for time and attention. What overcomes these 1000s is a greater desire for God. John of the Cross, in his Living Flame of Love 3:26, says the desire for God is the preparation for union with Him. The questions is: how do we increase our desire for God?  The first way is very simple: ask for it. God please give me a greater desire for you. I want to desire you above all things.  The desire you feed will grow. The desire you starve will die. If you feed your desire for God, then it will grow and this desire will lead you to a deep and profound union with Him. If you feed your desire for things of this world, this desire will lead you to seek happiness in things that can never satisfy and you will grow increasingly hungry and empty and nothing will satisfy you as you journey further and further away from God.  Stop feeding bad desires; feed good desires less; feed your desire for God more.  We all have bad desires, disordered desires - we desire good things in a way that begin to control us and become addictions. The roots of these are pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust. Think honestly about the desires that drive your life. Identity them. The desire to win; the desire to be wanted by your spouse or kids; the desire for safety, stability or security; the desire for entertainment, tasty food, the desire to feel good, to look good, to be the best. The desire to achieve great things. Any of these good desires can become disordered and prevent us from union with God and perfect happiness. Stop feeding the bad desires and they will begin to starve and die off. How? All these disordered desires are addictions we don’t seem able to break – well recognize your inability to change them, admit you are powerless over them, immediately turn to Jesus, then take these disordered desires to confession and he will begin to set us free.  Stop feeding bad desires but we also need to feed Good desires less. The desire for sleep, food, drink, exercise, family, friends, achievement, knowledge, beauty etc. are good desires. But if one good desire begins to exclude other good things we need and especially if it is stronger than our desire for God then it is an obstacle. So feed these less and they will shrink in power. How do I identify which desires are disordered or out of balance? Ask yourself – am I perfectly happy? What is it in my life that prevents my happiness? What is the cause? The cause will point to a disordered desire.   Feed your desire for God and it will grow.  Receive Jesus as often as you can in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is God, the consuming fire of love. The more you receive Him the more you will be inflamed with a desire for God. Fire sets other things on fire. God, in the Eucharist is a consuming fire of love. My experience is that when I go to daily Mass, I desire Jesus in the Eucharist more. My desire grows. Spend more time with Jesus in prayer. Proximity causes intimacy; while absence makes the heart go wander. The more we spend time with God the more we want him and the less we desire sin. Go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation at least once a month. Sin separates us from God and diminishes our desire for him. Confession unites us every more closely to God.

Prayer is friendship with God: it is talking, listening and just being with God. This corresponds to the three major expressions of prayer: Vocal prayer, mediation, and contemplation.

The goal of this friendship with God we call prayer is Heaven. Heaven is a transforming union with God. The journey to heaven does not begin at death. The journey or pilgrimage to heaven is supposed to begin now. In fact, you are traveling either closer to heaven or closer to hell at each moment. Time is dynamic. There is no standing still and there are only two ultimate destinations: heaven and union with God or hell and eternal isolation and loneliness.

We are indebted to the great Doctor on Prayer, Teresa of Avila, for explaining the different stages in the journey of the soul to Heaven or union with God. The landscape of prayer has been divided into (9) stages: Vocal prayer, Meditation, Affective prayer, Prayers of Simplicity, Infused Contemplation, Prayers of Quiet, Prayers of Union, Prayers of Conforming Union, and the Prayers of Transforming Union.

It is a doctrine of the Catholic Church that every person was created by God to reach at least the 5th stage of prayer, infused contemplation, because every person was created for holiness and holiness is the fruit of contemplation. Every one of you praying now has the God given capacity to reach at least the 5th stage in this life – that is if you desire it and persevere in prayer.

St. Faustina describes her experience of contemplation this way: "O Holy Trinity, Eternal God, I thank you for allowing me to know the greatness and the various degrees of glory to which souls attain. Oh, what a great difference of depth in the knowledge of God there is between one degree and another! Oh, if people could only know this! O my God, if I were able to attain one more degree, I would gladly suffer all the torments of the martyrs put together."

With Stages 3-4  we begin to desire to spend time with Jesus and Mary without talking, without trying to figure things (discursive meditation), but simply to remain alone with them in quiet.

John of the Cross describes this as: “An inclination to remain alone and in quietude…If those in whom this occurs, know how to remain quiet (not talking or trying to figure things out) they will soon in that unconcern and idleness delicately experience the interior nourishment.”

This prepares us for stage 5 (contemplation): “Contemplation is nothing but a hidden, peaceful and loving inflow of God. If it is given room, it will inflame the spirit with love.” John of the Cross

The transition from stage 4 to 5 involves: The Dark Night of the Senses

Which accomplishes 2 things in us. First, it purges the soul of all disordered attachments, misdirected desires, and idols and addictions that block God from entering more fully (Pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, lust). Then, it prepares the soul to share more fully in His divine life. We could not handle His divine life if He didn’t prepare us. It would be like pouring new wine into old wine skins.

Contemplation is an experience of God, drinking of the Living Water which quenches the thirst of the soul which satisfies as nothing else in the world. How do we prepare to Drink of the Living Water?

Jesus said to St. Angela of Foligno, “Make yourself a capacity and I will make myself a torrent.”

1. Desire, want transforming union with God

2. Receive the Eucharist and Reconciliation Frequently

3. Persevere in a Daily Examination of Conscience with Daily Meditation and a Resolution

4. Pray the Daily Rosary

5. Live a well ordered and balanced life (a Rule of Life)

6. Have a Spiritual Director or at least good Spiritual Friendship to give you encouragement and accountability. 

Why would anyone want to pray? I want to pray because I want to be happy. Happiness is to possess the good things that complete or fulfill our human nature. In general, God designed the Human Person to need certain good things to be satisfied. We need: physical goods, psychological goods, family and friendship, knowledge, meaningful work, beauty, and identity. 

If you had all these would you be perfectly satisfied? No! And that is the right answer because even though the things of the world are good…the Problem lies in this: Nothing is perfect, lasting, or enough. I desire more - union with God. We were made for union with God. 

Today is the Feast of St Augustine and he summed up this desire for union with God when he wrote “you have made us for yourself, O Lord and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

The good things in life are the cups – Jesus is the Living Water. The good things in life we need to be happy – physical, emotional, family, friends, meaningful work, knowledge, beauty, ect… are like cups. But Jesus is the Living Water that needs to fill the cups. Without the Living Water, without a personal relationship with Jesus, then we might have all the right cups, but they are empty. Then we become unsatisfied with our spouse, our house, our job, our health and wealth and everything else.

The danger is that we think the problem is with the cup. The cup is empty so we think the problem is with the cup and we think we can solve the problem by getting rid of this cup and getting a different cup, a different spouse or house or vacation or better health or whatever. But the problem was not with the cup

The problem is not with the cup, the problem is that the cup is empty of the Living Water, empty of the personal relationship with Jesus that comes through prayer. A different or new cup wont solve the problem. The solution is to fill our existing cups, fill our lives with the Living Water that is Jesus that comes through prayer.

A Personal relationship with Jesus is the Living Water that can fill up every area of life so that we can be satisfied. In John 7 Jesus stood and cried out: 'If any man is thirsty, let him come to me! Let the man come to me and drink…For My heart is a Fountain of living water.” The Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church are the Fountains from which the Living Water flows. The Eucharist is the Fountain par excellence because the Eucharist is literally the Heart of Jesus. If you want to drink the Living Water, then you must to come to the Heart of Jesus. The sacraments, especially the Eucharist, is the Fountain. But it is possible to come to the well and not drink. Not only do we need to come to the fountain, but we need to open up and Drink the Living Water. We drink in the Living Water of Jesus by Prayer. 

Pope Benedict writes: “Prayer is the self-opening of the human spirit to God.” (Jesus of Nazareth vol 2, p. 233) Many people come to the Fountain of Living Water but they do not drink in the living water because they do not have a personal friendship with Jesus in prayer and they spend little or no time in prayer.

Prayer is friendship with God. What does friendship take? Time… time talking, listening, and just being together. The Great Teresa of Avila writes “Prayer…is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; its means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.”

Prayer is friendship with God: it is talking, listening and just being together. This corresponds to the three major expressions of prayer: Vocal prayer,  meditation, and contemplation. 

Prayer is friendship with God, talking to him from the heart, listening and just spending time with Him. We want to drink the Living Water, but have you ever experienced that you cant talk and drink at the same time. We can't drink the living water unless we spend time drinking and listening.

We are all addicts. Addicts to the sins we have turned into habits that are buried so deep in our sub-conscience we do them without even thinking. There are seven roots of our addiction and they are known as the deadly sins: Pride, envy, anger, acedia, greed, gluttony and lust. Pride in the form of self-reliance, the disordered desire for perfection, or being a control freak, refusing to listen to anyone other than oneself; but Pride is also found in timidity, anxiety and fear. Envy is a sadness at someone’s good and pleasure at their misfortune. It leads us to gossip, backbiting, tearing others down in the attempt to raise ourselves up. Its why we love hearing and spreading dirty laundry. Anger and impatience – that’s probably self-explanatory. Acedia or Sloth which is not laziness but rather an aversion to the invitation from God to become a saint. So rather than heed the invitation from God we escape his call through our constant busyness and entertainment which keeps us from doing those things that will really bring us into union with God. After all, there’s nothing more difficult than becoming holy. Greed is a disordered love of getting and possessing. Although this might involve mere money, it can also take the form of an excessive desire for position, knowledge, and other goods. It is the desire for satisfaction and fulfillment in the possession of things which tries to find security in worldly realities, rather than in God. When we fail to trust that God will provide our daily bread then we seek to grab all that we can and store it up for a rainy day. Gluttony refers to eating, drinking and drug use for the sake of pleasure or to escape the reality we find too hard, too painful, or too boring. Finally, Lust, the way we use others sexually to get what we want. Men use women to get what they want and women use men to get what they want. We each want something different but we use one another just the same.

The seven deadly sins do not make us happy and our sins certainly don’t make the lives of those around us better. In fact, they destroy the good things in life we need to be happy. If we want to be set free we need to do three things:

First, make a searching, honest and fearless examination of conscience. Then, admit to God, to ourselves and to a priest the exact nature of our wrongs in the sacrament of Reconciliation. Finally, do our penance, that is, practice the virtues that conquer the vices to which you have been enslaved: practice humility, good-will, meekness, magnanimity, generosity, temperance, charity, courage, honesty, patience, etc.

One of the things that can prevent me from receiving the freedom and healing I need in the Sacrament of Reconciliation regularly is that get lazy about doing a daily examination of conscience. Then when I think about confession I seem to get this amnesia and can’t remember any of my sins so I put it off until I have some sins. I need to change this. At the beginning of each day, or the beginning of my time in meditation, or at the end of the day, I need to take a few minutes for an examination of conscience which consists of three things:

 Gratitude, acknowledgment of our wrong, and a practical game plan to go forward. 

Start with Gratitude – call to mind all the things for which you are you thankful to God? Then think back over the last 24 hours and admit where you have sinned in your thoughts, words or actions. Ask, why did I do these things? What was at the root? Was it Pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony or lust? Then make a practical game plan to live differently today.

God forgives our sin and gives us His grace to be changed and transformed. But, its not magic - we must do our part. Don't try to change everything in your life. Pick one thing to change, one virtue to practice, and that will enable you to change everything in your life eventually.