On Grace

26 February 2025

Only grace can change us, and grace is presence of Christ.

        Dom Hugh Gilbert

The Image and Temple of God

22 February 2025

The human race has been so created and then so redeemed that we as the image and temple of God might celebrate the praises of God. For God wills to be known and worship.

        Philipp Melanchthon

On the Liturgy

26 January 2025

The primary and exclusive aim of the liturgy is not the expression of the individual's reverence and worship for God. It is not even concerned with the awakening, formation, and sanctification of the individual soul as such. Nor does the onus of liturgical action and prayer rest with the individual. It does not even rest with the collective groups, composed of numerous individuals, who periodically achieve a limited and intermittent unity in their capacity as the congregation of a church. The liturgical entity consists rather of the united body of the faithful as such-- the Church--a body which infinitely outnumbers the mere congregation.

        Romano Gardini

A Unity of Outlook

25 January 2025

There is one work because there is one mystery, there is one baptism because there was one death for the world. There is a unity of outlook cannot be separate.

        St. Ambrose of Milan

On Forgiveness

24 January 2025

Forgiveness is not the comfortable, often somewhat superior, "I forgive you" that comes so easily to human lips when emotions are cooled. Things are then smoothed over but the resentment descendants into the unconscious together with a hidden condition that the "forgiven" injury shall not be repeated. The ultimate experience of forgiveness brings a change of heart, a mentanoia of the spirit, after which every seeming injury, injustice, rejection, past, present, future, every so-called blow of fate, becomes, as it were, a essential note in the music of God, however discontent it may sound to our superficial hearing. And the experience excludes nothing -- which means that in this moment of forgiveness all one's sins and weaknesses are included, being at the same time remembered and known as the essential darkness which has revealed to us the light.

        Helen M. Luke

Worldly Desires

23 January 2025

The world loves everything more than Jesus.

        Scott Bruzek

On Holy Scripture

22 January 2025

Let us draw from the fountain of the perpetual garden and the purest waters springing into life eternal.  Here let us luxuriate; here let us revel without ever being satisfied, for the Scriptures possess inexhaustible grace.

        St. John of Damascus