Authentic religion binds people together in peace and harmony with each other and their Creator.
Modern people stress their search for God. Biblical people emphasized God’s search for us.
We take time for eating and sleeping, they nourish and rest our bodies. We take time for family and friends, they nourish our emotions. We take time for work, recreation, exercise; they help us have a healthy life…Do we give time to this loving Holy Spirit?
A person’s character doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is built up over the course of years. It is a composite of numberless, individual decisions, made minute by minute. And the beginning of our character, dear graduates, begins with our thoughts. This is because our thoughts lead to actions, and repeated actions become habits, and habits form our character. And it our character that determines our destiny!
The conjugal view of marriage is an echo of Christ’s self-giving love. And only the marriage between a man and a woman can reflect Christ’s self-giving love and be fruitful in the bearing of children.
We need to stop cloaking the ugliness of abortion with misnomers like “proper medical coverage” or “choice.” It’s violence of the most intimate sort, and it needs to end.
God has created us with the frightful gift of freedom. We are not puppets on a string. We are not predetermined in our actions. We have the freedom of choice to do good and to avoid evil. The reason? God has created us for love. God who is perfect love wills to give himself to us.
God loves us and he wills that we love him in return. Not because he is selfish, but because he is generous and wants to fill us with love. Love cannot be coerced. Love must be free. And so God gives us the freedom to love him by doing the good that leads to him. But, this also means he leaves us free to do the evil that turns us away from him and our true happiness.
When we invite Mary into our homes and lives, she brings Christ, in new and profound ways..She will be the renewal of springtime to each of you, allowing Christ to blossom evermore fully in your heart.
(W)e remember that because Jesus is our Way, our Truth and our Life, then together we journey in firm faith to the Father with a faith that will always support us.
We’re living in a society where more and more of our neighbors go through their daily lives without even thinking about God. They live as if there is no God, or as if his existence doesn’t make any difference.
But we’re coming to realize that we can’t live without God — not as individuals and not as a society. We’re finding out that when we lose our sense of God, we lose the “thread” that holds our lives together. We lose the answers to the questions that help us make sense of the world: What kind of person should I be? Why should I be good? What should I believe in? What should I be living for — and why?
God has not ceased to breathe the Holy Spirit into the Church. Without that Spirit, the Church would be a corpse, but with the breath of God within us, the Church becomes the Body of Christ – wounded it is true, but still radiant with the life that is bigger than death, the life of Easter.
The basic point is that the maintenance of the natural environment is dependent upon respect for the human one. By human ecology is meant that network of interrelationships and interactions that form both the human person and human community. To respect this ecology we need to understand and respect the principles which under-gird it: the right to life at all stages; the truth of marriage and family; universal human dignity; human solidarity, especially with the poor, vulnerable and marginalized.
Like the Good Samaritan, Father Damien is an example for us all, encouraging us to join him now, to not simply walk past those broken people lying in a ditch saying “let someone else take care of them, let the government or some charity do it,” but to get involved personally, touching their lives and offering them our compassion and consolation, confidence and hope. In this way we can transform their lives and the world, by the infinite and merciful love of God, curing them of their despair and allowing them to know the joy of the Risen Christ.
The decisions we make in life must be made in the light of knowing that these decisions determine our eternal fate.
Don’t just stand there, the angels tell us as we look up at heaven. Jesus has told us to do something. God wants to transform you and me by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Then he wants us to live our faith and share it with others. In this way we help transform the world.
