Memorare

Quotes: G.K. Chesterton @ the Bible

How Do You Take God’s Love: With Attitude or Gratitude?

Taking something away can be an act of love.

Really?

Imagine a child who likes to eat chocolates before going to sleep. His mother, knowing that those chocolates will ruin his teeth, will take them away. It was an act of love on the part of the mother. But how would the child react to it?

First, the most common, would be he will get angry. The child might think that his mother is being wicked because she is taking away the source of his pleasure. Or he might think that his mother is a dictator who wants to impose her rules on everyone.  Or he might think that he is being punished by something he did before.

Second, a rarity, would be that the child would be grateful. He sees and understands the action of his mother. He understands that his mother has to take away what pleases him for a greater good… saving his teeth.

Most of us only think that God loves us when things are going our way or when we get what we want. As long as everything is pleasing to us, we feel loved by God.

But God’s love goes beyond what is pleasing to us. God’s love goes beyond our selfishness.

God’s love wants the best for us, even if we don’t want it for ourselves.  God want to save our life in this lifetime and most especially in the next. He will take away want needs to be taken away to save us. Like a mother taking away a chocolate to save her child’s teeth. Or a doctor cutting away a cancerous foot to save the whole leg.

“If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.” – Matthew 18: 8-9

God is love. He does not just act loving, He is love Himself. Nothing comes out of God except love. So everything He wills or permits come from His love.

Our pains and suffering were permitted by God’s love for reasons only we shall know when we are with Him in heaven.

God continually heals us from our fallen nature, from our sins. And sometimes, part of the healing process is something being taken away. To heal the alcoholic, one must take away the source of his disordered pleasure and addiction, the alcohol. The alcoholic cannot completely recover until he is to sacrifice his alcohol.

Maybe God is taking something from us right now to bring us to a better place, or to make us a better person, or to save our souls.

God will not take something away from you just for the heck of it. He loves you too much to mess with you.

So in abundance or desolation, let us be grateful.

For we are eternally loved by God. And that will never change.

So let your attitude be of gratitude.

It’s the way to happiness: Contemplate the Trinity

It is time to shout to the world that the Trinity is first and foremost joy and happiness. And contemplating the Trinity can overcome the great unhappiness of the world.

God is happy! St. Augustine says that God is happy and makes people happy. Happiness is part of the very mystery of his being. Being the highest good, he is also the highest and infinite happiness. St. Francis of Assisi exclaims, “You are joy; You are … joy” in his “Praises of God.”

God is happiness for the very same reason that the Trinity is happy: because he is love. Happiness, in fact, is to love and be loved. God, from all eternity, loves his Son with an infinite love, and the Son returns that love with an equally infinite love. The Father finds “all his pleasure,” that is, his happiness, in him. Since God is happy, he does everything that he does with joy: he creates with joy (see Job 38:7), he saves with joy, and he even suffers with joy.

The Holy Spirit, pouring the love of God into hearts (see Romans 5:5), at the same time pours into them the happiness of God that is inseparable from this love. Because of that, one of the first fruits that is produced in our souls is joy (see Galatians 5:22). The happiness of God is like an overflowing river “whose streams make glad the city of God” (Psalm 46:4), i.e., the church.

We all want to be happy. Just hearing the word “happiness,” people perk up, so to speak, and look to see if, by chance, you are able to offer something for their thirst. This is the one thing that unites all people, without exception, whether they are good or evil. No one, in fact, would be evil if he or she did not hope to be happy through that evil thing.

We carry the desire to be happy engraved on our hearts, because God has created us in “his image and likeness,” and since he is perfect happiness, he made us for happiness too.

But then, we ask ourselves, why are so few people truly happy? And even those who are, why are they happy for such a short time? It is not difficult to discover where the error lies. Scripture tells us, “God is love” (1 John 4:8); people have believed they can reverse the statement and say, “love is God”! Revelation tells us that God is happiness; again people invert the order and say, “Happiness is God”!

But what happens when we do this? Human beings do not know happiness that is pure, absolute, eternal, and transcendent, just as they do not know absolute love. They know fragments of happiness, which are often reduced to temporary intoxications of the senses, joys that are like fragile glass that always risks being shattered into fragments from one moment to another. In this way people deify the experience of joy and make it an idol.

This explains why whoever seeks God always finds joy, while the person who seeks joy does not always find God, but often finds only broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Augustine says, “you have made us and drawn us to yourself.” It is the whole Trinity that has made us; the Trinity is the Creator-God of Christians. We have been made for the Trinity, and our hearts will be restless until they rest in it.

Written by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa

Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa is a well-known Franciscan Capuchin preacher and writer. This is adapted from his book, Contemplating the Trinity, a series of meditations given to the papal household of John Paul II. Click here to read an excerpt.

"Do It Anyway" - Mother Teresa

 “a sign on the wall of Shishu Bhavan, the children’s home in Calcutta.”

"Do It Anyway"

People are often unreasonable,
illogical and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind,
people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful,
you will win some false friends and true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank,
people may cheat you;
Be honest anyway.

What you spend years building,
someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness,
they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today,
people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis,
it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

Quotes: Padre Pio

New Way of Seeing Everything: A Gift from God

By Peter Kreeft

This way of looking at things, as gifts and signs rather than simply as things in themselves, is not our usual way of seeing. Try this new way for just one hour and see the difference it makes. See the sunrise not as mindless, mechanical necessity bit as God’s smile. See a wave not just as tons of cold salt and water crashing down on the shore but as God’s playful action. See even death as not just a biological necessity but as God’s tucking us in our bedtime so that we can rise to new life in the morning

This is not a trick we play on ourselves or a fantasy. This is what the world really is. It is just as true to say that every snowflake is a gift of God as it is true to say that every cent is a father’s inheritance is a gift to his children. It is just true to say that every leaf on every tree is a work of art made by the Divine Artist with the intention that we see it, know it, love it, and rejoice in it, as it is true to say that every word in a lover’s letter to his beloved is meant to be seen, known, loved, and enjoyed. This is not fantasy. What is fantasy is the horrible habit the modern world has gotten itself into, the habit of thinking that what the world really is is only atoms and chance, only what the senses and science reveal and everything else is mere subjective fancy.

(Excerpt from “The God Who Loves You”)

The Eucharist: Heaven Kisses Earth

What the Church and the Saints say about the Eucharist

Music by Matt Maher, "The End and the Beginning"

Created by Daxx Bondoc

Quotes: Mother Teresa

Is God Just Your Spare Tire?

Do you treat God like a spare tire? Do you only remember and bring Him out when you get flat on your face or hit flat broke?

Sadly, most of us are guilty of it.

Maybe the world has no direction and is lost because we put the One Person Who should be in the driver’s seat locked up at the back of the trunk. And the blind have taken over and causing havoc all over the place. The world is full of blind drivers pretending to know where they are going and taking other blind people along the ride. No wonder the world is messed up.

The last thing you want to be driving your life is a blind sinner (that is us by the way).  Our sins and selfishness are like cataracts in our eyes. Sinners are short-sighted, the length of their vision is only as far as themselves. It is hard to know where you are going when you only see yourself all the time.

I guess that is why God permits us to get flat… on our face or broke.  When you are speeding yourself towards a cliff, a flat tire is a life saver. Maybe God permits crisis to save your life from falling into eternal damnation.

We sinners have a tendency to focus on getting what we want that we don’t see anything else other than the object of our desire. We don’t see the dangers along the way and most of all the dangers after gaining it. You have been running towards the top obsessively that you did not see that there are no more steps under your feet. You crash down and find yourself broken.

God sometimes sends obstacles along the way to stop us on our deadly track. He stops us so we can take a breath and think which way we are going. Are we going our way, or are we going The Way. The Way that is Jesus.

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." – CS Lewis

God knows that there is only “One Way” for us to have “The Life”. That Way and Life is Himself. He alone can drive us towards Himself. He alone can give joy to our lives, in this one and on the next.

"Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them." - Archbishop Fulton Sheen

God is not your spare tire, He is the car that will carry you to Eternal Bliss. He is also the Driver to get you there. But He is also the Way and the map (Jesus’ life is our guide to salvation). We are all just willing passengers. We follow whatever He tells us.

God is not our spare tire, nor do we want to be spared of Him.

He alone knows where each and one of us is going.