🧀The Cheese & Crackers = Quotes by St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bernadine of Siena
🌽The Veggies = My 2💰
🍟The Potatoes = Article: “Mary and the Way of Exaltation” , by Fr. Jean du Coeur de Jésus d’Elbée
🍗The Meat = Book: ”The Prayer of the Presence of God, The Deeper Search”, by Dom Augustin Guillerand, O. Cart
🍰The Dessert = YouTube Video: “To Be At Peace With Oneself”, by Fr. Jacques Philippe (Part 3 of 8)
🛑 The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him to Truth." By St. Thomas Aquinas
💮 “From the moment she conceived the Word of God in her womb, she obtained a certain jurisdiction, a sort of authority over every temporal possession of the Holy Spirit, to such an extent that we receive the grace of God only through Mary.” By St. Bernadine of Siena
🌹tmm= Some might see this as a reason for severe reprimands
🌹St. Therese = All the secret store of grace
🌹tmm= Unseen by many, for they see not an inkling or even a trace
🌹St. Therese = I fling into needy hearts,
🌹tmm= Steadily and swiftly, not in parts
🌹St. Therese = Crying in the bitter night
🌹tmm= With a heavily burdened heart that’s longing to be breezy and light
🌹St. Therese = Of fear and loneliness
🌹tmm= Desiring the Lord’s tender caress
🌹St. Therese = Spendthrift of your Love
🌹tmm= Enough is enough, never can that be when referring to what comes from above
🌹St. Therese = I keep before me
🌹tmm= Visions of the Most Holy and Blessed Trinity
🌹St. Therese = Your empty Hands
🌹tmm= How magnificent are the fingerprints of Heaven’s plans
🌹St. Therese =Empty and riven
🌹tmm= Nevertheless spirit driven
🌹St. Therese = With the great nails
🌹tmm= Each one severely assails
🌹St. Therese = Hollowing out rivers of mercy
🌹tmm= Greatly satisfying the appeal for leniency
🌹St. Therese = Until all your substance was poured out
🌹tmm= Do we really dare to understand what that was truly all about?
🌹St. Therese = So, I, my Jesus, with hands emptied for your love
🌹tmm= Surrender totally myself wholeheartedly without the need for a push or shove
🌹St. Therese = Stand confident before your Cross
🌹tmm= May that be the position embraced by all without being viewed as an albatross
🌹St. Therese = love’s crimson emblem
🌹tmm= A stark witness that should speak volumes to all and not just to some
🌹St. Therese = It is the empty who are filled:
🌹tmm= Not so for the “full of self” and those who are so self-willed
🌹St. Therese = Those who have made themselves spendthrifts for You alone
🌹tmm= Find peace and joy in a way that passes all understanding penetrating deep down to the bone
🌹St. Therese = Fill the least of your brethren
🌹tmm= A friend looking out for a friend
🌹St. Therese = While they themselves are nourished by your Love…
🌹tmm= Safe and secure, clothed, then there’s nothing to ever be afraid of
🌹St. Therese = More and more emptied
🌹tmm= Yes, that’s the way to go indeed
🌹St. Therese = That they may be filled with You.
🌹tmm= The goal of goals for all to relentlessly pursue
“I have asked the Immaculate Queen to comment on these words in the intimacy of your soul, to bring Jesus closer to you, or rather to open your eyes to his adorable presence, for he is always with you.
📖Haggai 1:13 “Then Haggai, the messenger of the LORD, proclaimed to the people as the message of the LORD: I am with you!—oracle of the LORD”
My whole intention has been to give him to you in a more profound way and to plunge your hearts for time and eternity into his heart, the abyss of fire and blood opened for you. But that is the work of Blessed Mary. Jesus has belonged to Blessed Mary since her fiat in Nazareth. It is her prerogative to give him to you, and it is also through her that he wills to receive your gifts and especially your hearts. May she hide you in his heart and keep you there forever….
Blessed Mary is the most imitable of all the saints. If I search the catalogue of the saints for a model of the most humble and poorest of women on earth, I find not a single one who is more truly this model than Blessed Blessed Mary. In our time Jesus also wants hidden saints like the woman of Nazareth, who distinguish themselves in nothing exteriorly, but who burn interiorly. Never, moreover, have there been more saints of this kind than in our day.
A jewel in the heart of Blessed Mary was her total abandonment: her living and limitless faith. The angel brings her the phenomenal announcement: she will be the mother of the Messiah; the Son of God will be her Son. Seeing her moved in her humility and not understanding how she will remain a virgin, the angel reassures her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
📖 Luke 1:35 “And the angel said to her in reply, “The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God”
He reminds her that nothing is impossible to God.
📖Luke 1:37 “for nothing will be impossible for God.”
He gives her a sign. God has spoken, and the response pours forth from the depths of the soul of Blessed Mary: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to your word.
📖Luke 1:38 “Mary said, ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.’ Then the angel departed from her”
This is the fiat of Blessed Mary, pronounced in the name of all humanity. Without her we would not have Jesus; we would not have our Brother, our Friend, our Savior. The loving abandonment of Blessed Mary is at the origin of our redemption. At the origin of the redemption of those souls whom God has resolved to save through you must be also your loving abandonment, your Ecce ancilla, your fiat. He asks you to pronounce these words very often each day, which sometimes cost our feeble nature so much, with unreserved acceptance of the divine will, whatever it be—so often crucifying yet always to be held in adoration”
“The saints and spiritual writers constantly return to this idea of the disorder within us, which is the consequence of sin, and they are right in doing so. Like them, I repeat: Life is not literature. Before we can assimilate anything, we have to turn it over in our minds again and again. To take in and to assimilate is a slow process. The mind has to concentrate on its object a long time, if it is to take on its form and live it. This object is a positive one: it is God, the ideal form and the perfect model. But it is also, on the other hand, all that is opposed to his pure image, and to his communication of life. God wants to transform us into sons of light, but he finds us children of darkness. He wants his Spirit, the Spirit of Love, who is the Gift of Self, to live in us, but he finds us possessed by another spirit which is the love of self. This negative element, which surrounds only after a struggle, must disappear.
Life is a battle, a battle between God and the spirit of evil. When a soul ceases to fight, it may be counted as hopelessly lost. And a soul that does not pray is one that has given in without a struggle. It possesses a kind of peace, but it is the peace of an occupied territory, conquered by the invader and resigned to his domination. What we find blameworthy in spiritual writers is not that they insist on this too much, but that they do not insist on it enough. We are living in an age of knowledge rather than of understanding. Pure reasoning and memory hold the day. The whole object of so much of our writing is to satisfy these cravings, to provide men with ideas rather than to enrich their souls and deepen their lives.
It is the fashion today to write popular works and articles in magazines for people living in the world. They must know everything, and be able to talk about the latest book or the most recent discovery. Men's minds are like those artificial floral displays we see on festive occasions. We arrange beautiful flowers, which we enjoy without having cultivated them. We do not even know their names and by the morrow we have forgotten all about them. With prayer it is not just a matter of having read and realized for the moment its necessity, its grandeur, the immense blessings it confers, its increasing comfort, the glory it gives to God and its mission to the world.
We must return to these thoughts again and again; we must constantly reflect on them and live them. This is what the Holy Spirit does in the Scriptures, what the Church does in its offices, and the saints in their daily prayers and constant meditations. We must continually look for the essential Beauty behind the external beauty of things. We must turn from the weakness of our fallen nature to the strong tenderness of the Son of God, who became our Redeemer and is ever ready to receive us back into his favor. We must turn from the perpetual menace of the devil and of the world which hangs over us, to the unfailing help which is offered us by our Savior, whose great desire is to rescue us from their tyranny.
Our principal danger is a spiritual one, the danger of losing our true life; all other dangers are directed towards this. They are the various ways in which each of us may be put to the test. We must pray, therefore, before all else, that God may live in us and we in him. We must pray that our trials may contribute to that divine life, which is the only true life and the only true good. We may ask that God will in his goodness preserve us from persecutions, injustices, calumnies, attacks of one kind and another on our interests and rights, illnesses of body and mind- but always subject to the designs of his love, which must be out chief rule in all we ask for.
In his loving plan, God has foreseen that we must be tested, but he knows also that the patience with which we bear such trials in union with our divine Lord can prove an exceptionally rich and pure source of merit and of grace to expiate our sins. He knows that our natural and supernatural growth (the latter bringing the former within its scope) will in general be proportioned to such trials, and that the divine image, the reflection of the model of infinite Beauty, will shine resplendent in us as a result of these trials. In spite of myself, I return to these thoughts again and again; they do not exclude others, but they seem to me to embrace and assimilate them.”
Video link: https://youtu.be/ixZt8JsDbws