Holiness Is Happiest by: C.C.

I am being made holy, what use is it to be only happy ? There can be joy beyond measure, joy beyond the temporary feeling of happiness and those circumstances that we frequently deem as necessary in order to be content and happy.

Happiness and it's lack sends people escaping where their joy is found. Keeps them searching without, avoiding within, avoiding above, where our Lord demands our gaze to make sense in an ordered manner of our call to serve Him, and utilize what we possess presently, so to see the goodness and taste the true happiness joy of it at all  .

There is more to living than being merely happy, and nothing of happiness is truly known without the joy of striving toward holiness, and the fulfillment of seeking to be perfected in virtue.

Sanctity is the happiness we seek, unknown to us while we suffer to find it. I have learned to take my reality, that can often seem plagued with a seeming lack of things, or temporal struggles and disenchantment, completely to God.

In resting it there with Him in honest prayer, I am met with consolation of accompaniment. The providence of God's love and grace to be able to praise all lack as an abundant good for me on this path toward holiness.

This pursuit of sanctity is made possible by the humility of recognizing those times where I claim things need to be "remedied" born from my own selfishness,  opposed to viewing these challenges themselves as the medicine to great healing of the soul, and a greater union with God, and helping to form an increased love toward others in authentic charity.

The bigger the thorn it seems, the greater the providence of God when we recall to lean toward Him lovingly (often more in a sense of desperate pining than a loving lean!)

Sometimes there can be the temptation for me to think of myself as avoiding things that are truly troubling or greater issues that need more practical attention, but I can't deny God's supernatural aid amidst everything, holding all things together and making clearer the way, by blanketing all of it with His love by the simple witness of His profound gift of grace.

If this were lacking , surely I would suffer greatly, and truly there is suffering also now , but it is a blessing that produces wisdom and only more endurance .

We should not despise the means we are led to encounter the Cross. It is here we are instructed and opened to receive more love,we become accessible to a love that can give and pour out from all of this apparent toil, a deep empathy and love to others, in the true mindfulness of God's unconditional love for us.

Most importantly there is the bold assurance of God's undeniable accompaniment in the sacraments and the Divine Assistance available to us in the life of the Church that we so infrequently stir into flame. The sacraments serve to keep us nearer our Joy, and nearest our Living God on this path toward sanctity,  while the rest of the world settles for being "happy".

Today's Gospel reminds us of the narrow gate, we have many wide worldly loves that we need to shed so to enter into union with our Lord. Let us pray to persevere on this path, being witnesses of joy, children of hope, and learn to smile in our search for sanctity.

Gratitude and Heaven by:C.C

Bethany Retreat House Yard-Abbey of The Genesee 

Gratitude blasts open an attentiveness of Heaven, and suddenly an awareness wells open. In that moment God's reality is not just observed with thanks, but participated in. As if the very breath we breathe in knowledge that it's completely God's , breathes out life around us, and we are one with Him in this, and there is nothing that can take it away or make even one little breath insignificant.

I am most at peace in this, even amidst life with the two tots and plenty of duties. There remains present a place kept above and beyond it all, when hidden in Christ.

And rather than risking me to become estranged and an "enemy" of my world, this sacred hiding place in Christ, kept above and beyond,helps me to emerge as a lover in the most profound sense. 

Gratitude to God is the aching appreciation for eternity, in the humble recognition of glimpses of it's beauty present to us daily.

Simple gratitude must be the dwelling place of one who longs to know eternity. From here we begin scratching the surface of thanks for the immensity of the Eucharistic offering to us, sustaining us to reside, as if hidden in a small part of Heaven, in the midst of the world. 

Faith in Suffering & Purification. By:CC

All that is known to us presently is of God's wisdom, here for His glory, and somehow for our good, despite our limited knowing.

Even despite our pain in lack of understanding. 

To be purified isn't to wrestle overtly with how we're tried, but to desire the Cross in all things . Fastened to it, it's weight upon us, there we're carried to the clarity and knowledge to have some sense of what God's will may be in this time of fire. Suffering endured faithfully is the assurance of Christ's accompaniment. The subtle sense of not being abandoned or alone. A peace that surpasses all reason, and the supply of hope though nothing seen. To stir endurance in trial , lean on the Cross of Christ, by it we're carried.

If we're to aid by our gifts , or to offer relief to another, we should pray for it to be made known to us. 

We should reserve ourselves primarily to trust in God, a deep love of God that can face all suffering, not with sense of abandonment, but with holy participation, assured that the grace of the Cross joins us in our time of want by fulfilling our every need. 

We may despise evil, as is natural, but we must also be mindful not to deny God full dominion , or neglect to trust in His sovereignty. Even an over attentiveness to try and solve everything professes only belief and faith in oneself. 

To stir up the grace of our belonging, to persevere amidst the sufferings , to endure the fire of purification, we need to desire holiness , and desperately. 

Everything that God has promised and spoken is true,this alone should comfort us, and entrusted to Him faithfully we can succeed in growing in sanctity. 

Nearer to Him lovingly so that we may have glimpse of what is yet known, and work to be a humble and faithful servant wherever we are called to serve.(CC)

Pause And Appreciate The Beauty. By:CC

Why does everything , even things most significantly splendid and beautiful seem at times to fade away slowly with familiarity into disenchantment?
The bitter-sweet cross of our belonging to the infinite seems to bring us the grace of knowing what we're made for , but also leaves us pining with more longing in face of all that is made.
All of this resolved perhaps by seeking the infinite moment to moment , God's visitation and resting with the discipline to stay there and gaze at beauty that we know passes us too often.
Even still, how true of love. We look at the other, get to know them  and are drawn toward beauty. With familiarity this should only enhance the experience of enchantment , but often the opposite is true. This truth says more of us than the other. For they are no less enthralling. Our appetites bigger than our need , and our love more upon ourselves than born from the depth of Love.
 It is not with fresh eyes we must greet the beauty around us , but sober ones, awake to it all, and aware of the tragedy we bring upon ourselves failing to be drawn by love, smothered by self-absorption and disordered lust for beyond. (CC)

Never Alone By: C.C.

One thing that most humbles me in my walk with Christ and in striving to daily live out my faith, is the encounter with the awareness that others may not sense His nearness, that they should feel alone opposed to discovering that at the most radical point of solitude, if we truly give ourselves over toward faith and toward God , then we find there the most consoling company of all; our nearest Companion, and the truest capacity of communion.
The thought of one having to suffer loneliness or fear of being alone in being God's beloved, prompts me to such empathy and simultaneously such responsibility to shout as from a mountaintop that there is never any depth of loneliness too deep, or distance too far where God is not with us. We may not sense the closeness of peaceful sentiment perhaps at all times, we have no clarity to see beyond what God is presently doing, and we can't fathom or know the joy that lives just around the corner from where we are, or if it shall come. To reconcile ourselves to accepting the closeness of Christ and the nearness of His company that gives us more than anything we can imagine for ourselves, encourages us to live in the presence of God, and we then can rest in the trust of being God's beloved children. The peace of rest belonging to us most when we sit in trust, as my dear friend, Arleen once said on the comfy "beanbag chair of God" , and accept that we are loved. The awareness of this can be instructed, it must be learned deeply though by experience, often by the experiences that most wound us and pain us. Those times that unite us most deeply with the Cross are too the moments that confront us most intimately with the opportunity for resurrected joy born there. To question why some experience this clarity of grace or try and find a reason why people are perhaps disposed to the assurance of God's company is not important to answer. What is most vital is our need to live out from this place of understanding and depth of experience God's unconditional love toward all, including those we judge poorly as most far from Him. Our role becomes one of sharing the joy of the risen Lord by accompanying another at the Cross. To remind them that they are never alone , and to encourage there the experience of encountering the nearness of God's love that is "nearer to us than we are to ourselves". The joy of consenting to carry the Cross daily is encountering all of the unexpected "Simons" that the Lord sends our way to help carry the burden. Christ accompanies us in ways unknown to us, may we grow always in the awareness that we're never abandoned,never alone,but deeply loved.