All this thinking....

“All this endless thinking. It’s very overrated. … I blame the war. Before 1914, nobody thought about anything at all….” (The Dowager Countess of Grantham, Maggie Smith, (Downton Abbey)

O Holy Spirit, beloved of my soul, I adore You.

Enlighten me, guide me, strengthen me, console me.

Tell me what I should do.

 Give me your orders.

I promise to submit myself to all that You desire of me and accept all that You permit to happen to me.

Let me only know Your Will.

Ministers of the Gospel today have to respond to a widespread deafness to the music of faith, and a general weariness that shuns the demands of discipleship. Yet the hunger for God, even if unrecognised, is ever-present in our society, and the preacher's task, as a messenger of hope, is to speak the truth with love, shedding the light of Christ into the darkness of people's lives.

-- Pope Benedict XVI

Above all, we must keep alive the thirst for the Absolute in the world, not allowing a one-dimensional vision of the human person, in which humanity is reduced to that which it produces and consumes, to prevail. This is one of the most dangerous pitfalls of our times.

--Pope Francis

The Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, with His life-giving and unifying strength. Of many He makes a single body – the mystical Body of Christ. Let us never give in to pessimism, to that bitterness that the devil tempts us with every day. Let us not give into pessimism and let us not be discouraged. We have the certainty that the Holy Spirit gives His Church, with His powerful breath, the courage to persevere, the courage to persevere and to search for new ways to evangelise, to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

-- Pope Francis

“What we would like to do is change the world--make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”

― Dorothy Day

Inexhaustible

Harassed by life, exhausted, we look about us for somewhere to be quiet, to be genuine, a place of refreshment.  We yearn to restore our spirits in God, to simply let go in him and gain new strength to go on living.  But we fail to look for him where he is waiting for us, where he is to be found: in his Son, who is his Word.  Or else we seek for God because there are a thousand things we want to ask him, and imagine that we cannot go on living unless they are answered.  We inundate him with problems, with demands for information, for clues, for an easier path, forgetting that in his Word he has given us the solution to every problem and all the details we are capable of grasping in this life.  We fail to listen where God speaks: where God's Word rang out in the world once for all, sufficient for all ages, inexhaustible.  Or else we think that God's word has been heard on earth for so long that by now it is almost used up, that it is about time for some new word, as if we had the right to demand one.  We fail to see that it is we ourselves who are used up and alientated, whereas the word resounds with the same vitality and freshness as ever; it is just as near to us as it always was.

-- Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Prayer