Only one vocation

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... there is only one vocation.
Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick,
whether you are in religion or out of it,
married or single, no matter who you are,
you are called to the summit of perfection:
you are called to a deep interior life
perhaps even to mystical prayer,
and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others.
And if you cannot do so by word, then by example.

Yet if this sublime fire of infused love burns in your soul,
it will inevitably send forth throughout the Church and the world
an influence more tremendous than could be estimated by the radius
reached by words or by example.

--Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain

Check-in: Week One

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Have some virtual coffee with me....

How are we doing?

What are we doing?

If anyone wishes to share the struggles or fruits of prayer this week, please, let us do so together in the comments box.

Closing week one...
Philippians 1:6: For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.

Loving enemies

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Abba Zeno said, 'If a man wants God to hear his prayer quickly,
then before he prays for anything else,
even his own soul,
when he stands and stretches out
his hands towards God,
he must pray with all his heart for his enemies.
Through this action God will hear everything that he asks.'

--Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Silence

Inside Dachau.

Leave me here freely alone
In cell where never sunlight shone
Should no one ever speak to me
This golden silence makes me free

- Bl. Titus Brandsma (1881-1942)
Carmelite martyr, inscribed on the wall by his bunk at Dachau, where he was executed.

Soaked

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“[God's] Love is continually bubbling up in them. It cannot remain where it is, just as the spring-water seems unable to remain in the earth, but issues forth from it. Just so is it with the soul. It is already soaked in this water. It would want others to drink of its love so that they may help it to praise God.”

--Teresa of Avila: Life, Ch 30:19.

The goal

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The goal of our life is to live with God forever.
God, who loves us, gave us life.
Our own response of love allows God's life to flow into us without limit.

All the things in this world are gifts of God,
presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.

As a result, we appreciate and use all of these gifts of God insofar as they help us develop as loving persons.
But if any of these gifts become the center of our lives, they displace God and so hinder our growth toward our goal.
In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance
before all of these created gifts insofar as we have a choice
and are not bound by some obligation.
We should not fix our desires on health or sickness,
wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or short one.
For everything has the potential of calling forth in us
a deeper response to our life in God.

Our only desire and our one choice should be this:
I want and I choose what better
leads to the deepening of God's life in me.

--St. Ignatius, from the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises

Finding

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I have come to believe that most people in the world are slowly asphyxiating. People are not getting any "air" because their souls are not "breathing." To pray is to breathe. And people are not praying, so they are spiritually dying...or they may never have actually lived. Unfortunately, they do not know it and thus their situation is all the more dangerous.

To pray is to breathe. No more than the body can do without oxygen can the soul do without prayer, that is, without breathing God's life. . . . It is not that we pray simply because we have a few extra moments or we believe that it would be a good idea to pray. No. We pray because we must. . . . [W]e pray always by opening our hearts to the ever-present God.

--Fr. Stephen Rossetti, When the Lion Roars (70-71)

Seeking

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It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness;

He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you;

He is the beauty to which you are so attracted;

it is He who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise;

it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life;

it is He who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.

Pope John Paul II
World Youth Day 2000