No excuses, only apologies.  Life has been incredibly busy, and I have allowed it to become so.  My apologies for the length of this excerpt, but it has helped me see where I’ve twisted myself around and just maybe it can help someone else as well.  This is from Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Transformation in Christ.

The Bible is, after all, a Catholic book.

Find more priests who truly love their vocation and are willing to share that with others:

I once proposed a paper for my senior English thesis dealing with the role of organized religion in an individualistic society.  I was told that the modern society was not individualistic but rather formed of a series of group-think and peer-pressure groups.  Lo these many years since, and look where we have come.

From Thomas A. Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ:

If you cannot recollect yourself continuously, do so once a day at least, in the morning or in the evening. In the morning make a resolution and in the evening examine yourself on what you have said this day, what you have done and thought, for in these things perhaps you have often offended God and those about you.

Arm yourself like a man against the devil’s assaults. Curb your appetite and you will more easily curb every inclination of the flesh. Never be completely unoccupied, but read or write or pray or meditate or do something for the common good. Bodily discipline, however, must be undertaken with discretion and is not to be practiced indiscriminately by everyone.

Devotions not common to all are not to be displayed in public, for such personal things are better performed in private. Furthermore, beware of indifference to community prayer through love of your own devotions. If, however, after doing completely and faithfully all you are bound and commanded to do, you then have leisure, use it as personal piety suggests.

Not everyone can have the same devotion. One exactly suits this person, another that. Different exercises, likewise, are suitable for different times, some for feast days and some again for weekdays. In time of temptation we need certain devotions. For days of rest and peace we need others. Some are suitable when we are sad, others when we are joyful in the Lord.

About the time of the principal feasts good devotions ought to be renewed and the intercession of the saints more fervently implored. From one feast day to the next we ought to fix our purpose as though we were then to pass from this world and come to the eternal holyday.

During holy seasons, finally, we ought to prepare ourselves carefully, to live holier lives, and to observe each rule more strictly, as though we were soon to receive from God the reward of our labors. If this end be deferred, let us believe that we are not well prepared and that we are not yet worthy of the great glory that shall in due time be revealed to us. Let us try, meanwhile, to prepare ourselves better for death.

“Blessed is the servant,” says Christ, “whom his master, when he cometh, shall find watching. Amen I say to you: he shall make him ruler over all his goods.”

I grabbed my mother by the elbow and whispered, “is everything okay with Dad?”

“Yes,” she assured me, but the look on her face suggested she wasn’t quite telling me everything.  Mom had gone through a lot in life, not as much as many but no rose petal littered path either, and had learned to deal with things quietly by herself.  I, for my part, had learned how to figure out when she wasn’t saying what she was thinking.  Time to put on the stupid kid bit and just ask.

There is just something about the way Il Papa can move from painfully intricate to sublimely simple in a few short words.  I know the beginning of this is a bit heady for some, but get all the way through it – you won’t regret it.  From The Spirit of the Liturgy:

God is beyond all thought, and therefore all propositions about him and every kind of image of God are in equal proportions valid and invalid. What seems like the highest humility toward God turns into pride, allowing God no word and permitting him no real entry into history. On the one hand, matter is absolutized and thought of as completely impervious to God, as mere matter, and thus deprived of its dignity. But, as Evdokimov says, there is also an apophatic Yes, not just an apophatic No, the denial of all likeness. Following Gregory Palamas, he emphasizes that in his essence God is radically transcendent, but in his existence he can be, and wants to be, represented as the Living One. God is the Wholly Other, but he is powerful enough to be able to show himself. And he has so fashioned his creature that it is capable of “seeing” him and loving him.

I don’t normally go for overstatement (*ahem*) and in this case I don’t entirely think I am.  Sometimes you come across something where the only reaction you can come up with is stunned agreement, your mind torn equally between silently absorbing what you’ve taken in and the urge to yell out in your finest Southern Baptist twang, “Preach it!“  Adoro’s post Souls in the Balance is without a doubt one of those.  I echo here her closing sentiment: “Christ did not die a horrible death on the Cross so that we could be comfortable. Who, around you, is hanging in the balance? Go get them!”

Matthew Warner has a post that anyone who cares about evangelizing in this modern world has to read.  The numbers are stark and sobering.  Particularly for someone whose parish scores very low on the social networking scale.