“I earnestly admonish you, therefore, my brothers, to look after
your spiritual well-being with judicious concern.
Death is certain; life is short and vanishes like smoke.
Fix your minds, then, on the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Inflamed with love for us, he came down from heaven to redeem us.
For our sake he endured every torment of body and soul and shrank from no bodily pain.
He himself gave us an example of perfect patience and love.
We, then, are to be patient in adversity.”
St. Francis of Paola
(the bumblebees and the blueberries / Julie Cook / 2019)
The more man freely chooses to sin and place his own truth above God’s truth,
and the more sin becomes a habit and vice,
the more man becomes enslaved to the fleeting goods of this world;
he becomes bound to disordered love and constrained by disordered attachments.
In this way sin establishes an addictive pattern that keeps men from conforming
to the truth of their being.
Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers
from Behold the Man: A Catholic Vision of Male Spirituality
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