Verse of the day
Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil.
– Ephesians 5:15-16
Voice of the day
Living between the steps means we do not just follow the death march around us. It means we are responsible for making life out of every single moment.
– Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart
Prayer of the day
In a world full of distractions and hurt, help us to intentionally live out each step and each decision.
“From not knowing what is enough.
Great conflict arises from wanting too much.
When we know when enough is enough,
There will always be enough.”
It is clear that the greatest evils of humanity are due to lack of love and that the New Testament’s “miraculous catch” (see Luke 5) was not the haddock and shad and whatever else Peter and the rest of them caught that day, but the fact that Peter and the rest were caught up, even as we are, in the net of Christ’s love. — Credo, p. 25
In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair. — The Mood of Christmas
Gratitude flows from the recognition that all that is, is a divine gift born out of love and freely given to us so that we may offer thanks and share it with others.
The more we touch the intimate love of God which creates, sustains, and guides us, the more we recognize the multitude of fruits that come forth from that love. They are fruits of the Spirit, such as: joy, peace, kindness, goodness, and gentleness. When we encounter any of these fruits, we always experience them as gifts.
When, for instance, we enjoy a good atmosphere in the family, a peaceful mood among friends, or a spirit of cooperation and mutual support in community, we intuitively know that we did not produce it. It cannot be made, imitated, or exported. To people who are jealous, and who would like to have our joy and peace, we cannot give a formula to produce it or a method to acquire it. It is always perceived as a gift, to which they only appropriate response is gratitude.
Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.
He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead.
He who loves corruption rots.
He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow.
He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing. — Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island, p. 239)
“A church that doesn’t provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a Word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a Word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed, what gospel is that?”– Archbishop Oscar Romero
When we consider how much our educational, political, religious, and even social lives are geared to finding answers to questions born of fear, it is not hard to understand why a message of love has little chance of being heard.
Fearful questions never lead to love-filled answers.
“In a word, the end of our civilized society is quite literally up to us and our immediate descendants, if any. It is up to us to decide whether we are going to give in to hatred, terror and blind love of power for its own sake, and thus plunge the world into the abyss, or whether, restraining our savagery, we can patiently, and humanely work together for interests which transcend the limits of any national or ideological community.”—Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era, p. 25
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