Some days I feel like the entire day is spent encouraging, lecturing, threatening, and punishing kids into applying the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you…When you think about it, families can be composed of individuals who would never choose to live in the same hemisphere, much less in the same home!
There is no use denying that with the exception of rare intervals, our intercourse with God in this life is more or less laborious and difficult. This is only saying that Heaven is not yet come. Faith was meant to be a trial, and a trial it certainly is.
In a recent homily, our parish priest discussed the staggering fact that 80 percent of baptized young people are leaving the Faith before they are 25 years old.
A list of great spiritual reading books that will inspire Catholic children from preschool through high school.
Most of us are looking for spiritual reading suggestions that will serve us well during the Lenten season. Of course, there are the tried and true recommendations – Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux, Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales and others are amazing choices, and can certainly be read over and over again. But if you’re looking for something a little different this year, I have just the thing.
The Holy Family is the ideal to which all other families should subscribe, if they hope to find joy and fulfillment in this life.
Do not wait to take advantage of the opportunity to know God’s mercy as soon as possible, to live in His light, and to experience His joy right now!
Whatever you offer to God this Lent, may you present it with all the awkward generosity, sincere devotion and loving desire of a child.
This world is a battleground, and we, the Church Militant, are called to fight evil – whether on a societal level or in the deepest recesses of our own souls – that we might grow in union with God and join Him for all eternity in heaven.
In marriage, those small blessings we can offer our spouse tend to go a long way. Paula Zwenger captures their beauty in her poem, “This Man of Mine”
