More from St. Francis de Sales:
Learn to live in peace and gently bear up with your little miseries. You belong unreservedly to God. He will lead you safely to the port. If, however, he does not deliver you immediately from your imperfections, it means that he has some other plan for you and that could be to give you a longer formation in the practice of humility, so that you may be well rooted in that lovely virtue.
The next few days I would like to feed you some quotes from St. Francis de Sales, the great writer for lay folks. This first one addresses those of us who are overly concerned about doing everything right (another word for pride :-):
Take great care not to get overly upset whenever you commit some faults. Humble yourself immediately before God, but let this humility be a loving humility, which will fill you with fresh confidence to throw yourself immediately into God’s arms, secure in the knowledge that God, in his goodness, will help you to change for the better. And so, whatever be the faults you commit and whenever you commit them, gentle ask God’s pardon and tell him that you are perfectly sure that he loves you still and that he will forgive you. Always do this in a simple and gentle manner.
On Saturday evenings, we take turns preparing and sharing something about the Sunday readings. It was Sr. Sarah’s turn this past Saturday, and she shared this little nugget from St. Augustine. I said, “I need that for my blog! This would transform our lives if we lived it.
Let the Lord be your hope; do not hope to get anything else from the Lord God, but let the Lord God Himself be your hope. Many people hope to get money from God, many hope to get from Him honors that are transitory and perishable, or they want some other things from God, something other than God Himself. But you, you must simply ask for your God. (Augustine on Ps 40)
Let the Lord God Himself be your hope . . .
A well-loved and wonderful poem:
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.
Praise him.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins
To make you smile and give you hope:
The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them. (Abraham Lincoln)
Every year around the first of the year, each of us in our community draw an Epiphany gift, a virtue for the year. (Whether it’s a gift from God or something to work on is up to each to decide. 🙂 I myself drew “Mercy” for the second year in a row. Hmmm, what is God trying to say to me?
But the virtue I wanted to post about today is “Humility”. Here’s a great story about the superiority of humility to every other virtue:
Humility is of more value than the greatest asceticism. One day, as the desert monk St. Macarius (AD 300-391) was returning to his cell, the devil attacked him swinging a scythe, but was unable to wound him. The devil complained, “Macarius, i suffer a lot of violence from you, for I cannot overcome you. Whatever you do, I do also. If you fast, I eat nothing; if you keep watch, I never sleep. There is only one way in which you surpass me: your humility. That is why I cannot prevail against you.” (Frederica Matthewes-Green in The Jesus Prayer)
You can still celebrate Christmas for a few more days! Read this post from last January: “God loves to light little lights”
Have a wonderful and blessed ordinary day! Seriously, think about what an “ordinary day” means as a Christian. An ordinary day means incredible things: that we are loved unconditionally and without measure by a God who will never fail us and loved us to death. Don’t let the glory get lost under the ho-hum.
I know it’s the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, but I couldn’t find a good poem commemorating it, so instead I’ll share this one about Epiphany by Luci Shaw:
Star Song
We have been having
epiphanies like stars
all this year long.
And now, at its close,
when the planets
are shining through frost,
light runs like music
in the bones,
and the heart keeps rising
at the sound of any song.
An old magic flows
at the silver calling
of a bell,
rounding,
high and clear.
Falling. Falling.
Sounding the death knell
of our old year,
telling the new appearing
of Christ, our Morning Star.Now, burst,
all our bell throats!
Toll,
every clapper tongue!
Stun the still night.
Jesus himself gleams through
our high heart notes
(it is no fable).
It is he whose light
glistens in each song sung,
and in the true
coming together again
to the stable
of all of us: shepherds,
sages, his women and men,
common and faithful,
or wealthy and wise,
with carillon hearts,
and, suddenly, stars in our eyes.
I am away on retreat until January 8. Here are some old posts to read if you’d like:
Witnesses to Hope 