For His own sake…
· 31 March 2006
Only God is to be loved for His own sake. Everything else is to be loved for God’s sake.
Quotes for March 2006
If you do not love God…
· 30 March 2006
If you do not love [God], then no matter how clever you are, you are bound to misunderstand Him and His commands as threatening to what you love.
« πλ | Discernment »
A lifting of the heart and will to…
· 29 March 2006
Prayer is fundamentally a transformation of will, a lifting of the heart and will to God.
Humility is a means to…
· 28 March 2006
Humility is a means to love. Love cannot happen without humility and self-forgetfulness.
Saints were many things, but…
· 27 March 2006
Saints were many things, but two things none ever were: joyless and greedy. Many were sorrowful but none were joyless. And not all were poor in money, but all were poor in spirit. There are no yuppie saints.
Good teachers means two things…
· 26 March 2006
Good teachers, in turn, means two things, both of them love-things. The teacher by whom students are inspired, the teacher who changes their lives, is always a double lover. He is a lover of the subject and a lover of the student. Students detect that love almost infallibly, and it is simply irresistible.
Four steps deeper than law…
· 25 March 2006
Thus moral theology leads us four steps deeper than law. To fulfill the moral law, we need love. To get love, we need union with God. To get union with God, we need the new birth. And to get the new birth, we need faith.
In every sin…
· 24 March 2006
In every sin, we choose to believe the devil’s lie rather than God’s truth.
The face of love refused…
· 23 March 2006
God’s wraith is really only the face of love refused.
Something other than a lover…
· 22 March 2006
When we believe that God is something other than a lover, it is inevitable that we will sin.
A person can be known only by…
· 21 March 2006
God is a person [in Christ]. A person can be known only by personal understanding, not impersonal understanding. Personal understanding takes place through love, caring, willingness, intimacy, and relationship.
To realize that every individual is…
· 20 March 2006
Scripture starts with the particular and then universalizes it. You are called to love your concrete individual neighbor and then to realize that every individual is your neighbor. The point is not to destroy concrete neighborhood in a fit of universalism but to expand the local neighborhood and embrace the universal neighborhood.
God is present to everything…
· 19 March 2006
God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything. … There is not predestination but destination, not predestiny but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity.
Why pray…
· 18 March 2006
Why pray if we cannot change God? …is that why we pray? To change omniscient Love? Isn’t it rather to learn what it is and to fulfill it? Not to change it by our acts, but to change our acts by it.
A pure heart means…
· 17 March 2006
A pure heart means a single heart, a heart in which only one desire lives: love.
The last event in history…
· 16 March 2006
For the last event in history, according to the Bible, is a wedding feast. It is the supper of the Lamb, the celebration of the wedding between the Lamb and his Bride, the Church. That is, you and me.
Wraith is how His love appears…
· 15 March 2006
God is love. Wraith is how His love appears to us when we sin or rebel or run away from Him. The very light that is meant to help us appears to us as our enemy when we seek the darkness.
To God each one of us is…
· 14 March 2006
To God each one of us is His favorite. God’s love comes to all, but it comes to all as each, not to all as some anonymous aggregate.
His school of love…
· 13 March 2006
You see, God just will not let us flunk out of His school of love. He insists on remedial lessons until we get it right. For this whole world is a school set up by Love Himself to teach us to love.
Freedom…
· 12 March 2006
Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.
The Word of God…
· 11 March 2006
Christ is the Word of God in person. The Bible is the Word of God in writing. Both are the Word of God in the words of men. Both have a human nature and a divine nature.
Faith is not like bottled water…
· 10 March 2006
Faith is not like bottled water but like rain. Its destiny is not just to be kept and held but to make something visible grow.
Light refracted through a prism…
· 9 March 2006
Like white light refracted through a prism and split into many colors, God’s eternal love-nature, expressed through the prism of time, becomes God’s multicolored love story. History is His story.
The lesser as reflecting the greater…
· 8 March 2006
The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.
Faith and hope bring us through…
· 7 March 2006
Faith and hope bring us through time but leave us at the doorstep of eternity. Only love goes with us inside.
Agape is the catalyst that…
· 6 March 2006
Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.
The self is like a baseball…
· 5 March 2006
The self is like a baseball. Throw it back to the divine pitcher who pitched it to you in the first place, and the game of love goes on. Hold it, and the game is over. That is the difference between Heaven and Hell.
No effective rational answer to…
· 4 March 2006
There is no effective rational answer to the challenge: “But give me a reason why I should love someone who does not deserve it.” Love is the highest thing. There can be no higher reason to justify it.
Love is faith’s flower…
· 3 March 2006
Love is faith’s flower, hope is its stem. Grace comes into us by faith, like water through the roots of a tree. It rises in us by hope, like sap rising through the trunk of a tree. And it matures in us by [love] as fruit matures on a tree’s branches, fruit for the neighbor’s eating.
Trust is the middle term…
· 2 March 2006
The key to faith is love. We believe only if we love. Trust is the middle term; only if we love, do we trust; and only if we trust, do we believe.
![[Jerusalem Cross with Heart]](http://cowpi.com/journal/grafiks/jerusalem-cross-heart.gif "Jerusalem Cross with Heart")