Channel 7 Action News interview with the wife of West Bloomfield Police Officer Patrick O’Rourke who was killed on September 10, 2012 in the line of duty during a standoff between police and a barricaded gunman identified as Ricky Coley.
This is absolutely inspiring. Let’s keep her and her children in prayer and pray for the grace to respond as well as she is during this tragic time in her life.
From Cardinal Dolan a few minutes ago:
“A big chunk of my morning prayer are the words of St Peter. Prayers like ‘Lord, it’s good to be here’ and ‘Save me Lord, I’m drowning!'”
Your soul is called to raise itself to God by the elevator of love and not to climb the rough stairway of fear.
I have been meditating on this from St. Thérèse for a number of months now. My problem is that I keep getting off before reaching the top and start climbing the stairs. Then I remember the elevator! How about you?
“It is in Our Lady that God fell in love with Humanity.”
~Caryll Houselander
Friday: from the archives
(C.S. Lewis)
“When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun.” (St. John of Kronstadt)
Picking up again with selections from Fr. Joseph Langford’s, Mother Teresa’s Secret Fire:
“How often, in struggling with our weakness and failures, have we felt alone and ashamed, unworthy of God, tempted to flee from his presence as Adam and Eve after the Fall? After tasting this inner bitterness and pain wrought by our own sin and our own hands, have we not feared being abandoned by Love?”
“[T]he God revealed in Scripture [is] a God whose thirst moves him to reach out to us, to bring us back when we are lost; a God who is always seeking after us, always drawing us to himself.”
“In our darkest moments, in our own dark night of the soul, we all yearn to know that Love has not left us. We long to be assured that God does not flee from our faults, that he does not demand we first scale some moral Olympus before we can win back his favor.”
A Sunday-poem from Mother Mary Francis:
On Beholding a Field of Pink Lilies
Go, toss your pretty heads!
And who shall blame you,
Seeing your image in the eyes of God?
Petal upon pink petal,
Flirt with breezes
Leaning from dawn to watch your coquetry.
But suddenly my smiles
Of kind indulgence
Melt into tears to see you casting down,
Petal upon pink petal,
Your brief living
Gladly and gaily into the lap of God.
~Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C.
Friday: from the archives
One of our sisters is currently going into Detroit one day a week to work with the homeless. As you can imagine, she can easily experience being overwhelmed by the greatness of the needs she encounters. Any of us can have that same experience: e.g. what difference are we making in the fight against abortion or trying to amend the pending health care package so it will exclude provisions for assisted suicide . . . or “just” trying to instill the truth in a teenager’s mind.
A saying from Mother Teresa comes to mind: “The whole work is only a drop in the ocean. But if we don’t put the drop in, the ocean would be one drop less.”
Don’t cease to put your drops in, drop by drop. Each one counts.
Witnesses to Hope 