Saints travel in bunches. Create your halo, run toward Christ, together!
Reading the Catena Aurea with the day's Gospel recently, in the context of heresy, we encountered the wonderful word for weeds that grow and are sown among the wheat: tares (pronounced tears, like a tear in my shirt). Tares of the soul are those weedy thoughts that quickly got to seed, spreading their worldly temptations on the winds of our soulscape and sow themselves into our clay so we cannot distinguish them from our own thoughts.
Sin makes us deaf, blind, dumb, and stupid. Where our inner sinner is large enough, even when others attempt to point it out, we cannot see. We have a choice, when others on multiple occasions point out sin we do not see: either persist in arrogant presumption that we are in the right, or humbly realize that sin may have us in its grip and we cannot see what we cannot see.
When someone changes their diet, nutrition teaches the idea of a thirty day cleanse – the beginning of a shift to eating healthy by no longer eating unhealthy foods and eating only healthy foods. As with our clay, so with our soul.
(John 16:3-28 and Catena Aurea on the same)
Predestination is the reality that God, being Love and omniscient and omnipotent, knows who will choose to love His Son as Lord and Savior, Jesus our Christ and thus gives them the gifts to do so amidst the fallen world.
The worldly hear this and, being yet without eyes of innocence, cry injustice despite it being the very definition of justice. God gives His grace to those who will use them, however falteringly or poorly for being spiritual toddlers. God can do that. Free will remains, for each is free to choose God, but God, beyond time and space, infinite, needn't wait for them to choose Him to bestow His gifts upon them. In a solely linear time-and-space-limited existence, this would wreck free will, and, for us, herein lies the mystery because, for now, we are time-and-space-constrained, though, through Christ, we won't always be.
Never entertain sin or thoughts of sin! Upon the first whiff of sin, immediately draw the sword and pray:
Forgive me for being foolish! Help me see how ridiculous (name the temptation) is!
A wondrous commentary of the Gospels is given us by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his “Catena Aurea,” translated into English by Saint John Henry Neumann as “Golden Chain.” Imagine Saint Thomas inviting you to join a fire-side table tucked in the back corner of the local pub with a large halo of Saints and faith filled Catholic writers discussing the day's Gospel. To read the “Golden Chain” after reading the day's Gospel is to sit at that table and witness a masterful conversation unfold beyond time, at least through the centuries up to Saint Thomas' time.
A modern halo can hardly begin better than by reading the daily Gospel and the accompanying “Golden Chain” to deepen their intentional journey of entering into the eternal mysteries and applying them to our own lives, chatting, as is the experience, with Saints Augustine, Chrysostom, Gregory, Jerome, and many others. If you are looking for something for after having gone through the second reading of the Office of Readings for a year, here is your next year. May God startle you with joy!
Jesus tells us in the Gospels: What God has joined into one flesh, let no man tear asunder. Saint Paul extolls: Wives, obey your husbands; husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the Church.
Every wife and husband are joined by God to reveal God's love to the world, bear new life into the world, and provide, protect, and defend hearth, rearing their children to come to know God's breath in them and breath it into the world. Wives and husbands, each in their own way, reveal Christ to each other and are called to be humbly obedient to Christ in each other, running toward Jesus our sweet Christ hand in hand, sharing the delights and challenges of this pilgrims' journey. For each married person the path to salvation is their marriage, serving each other in Christ ... their primary halo, their #marriage.
As you share the journey in your halo, you may feel the call to deepen your prayer life. Cultivate prayer through adding simple, short prayers into daily life. This can happen in whatever ways work for you, but keep it simple. Ideas include prying the Our Father, Lauds or Vespers (Morning or Evening Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, easy with various apps), or the rosary before bed (our littles fall asleep during the rosary), the Angelus before lunch, the day's gospel reading before breakfast ... the possibilities are endless. Play with chanting your prayer aloud, inviting family or friends to join you. Chanting is easy to start (I have next to no musical skill): chant in a single note. Just start chanting, find a note that sounds good and work to maintain it. You'll be surprised how quickly you pick it up!
You may find activities that used to take up time feel empty or distracting. Things like watching television, being on Facebook or other social media can be dropped, making time for reading, family time, prayer, writing, and other more fulfilling activities.
Pay attention when you encounter the same idea multiple ways in different contexts.
Calibration to grace and for recognizing sin will increase as you journey with your halo.
Be amazed: what was written by Saints hundreds or thousands of years ago so often seems written for me, today, with what is happening.