Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle

For I think that God hath set forth us apostles, the last, as it were men appointed to death: we are made a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ; we are weak, but you are strong; you are honorable, but we without honor.

Even unto this hour we both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no fixed abode;  And we labor, working with our own hands: we are reviled, and we bless; we are persecuted, and we suffer it.  We are blasphemed, and we entreat; we are made as the refuse of this world, the offscouring of all even until now. I write not these things to confound you; but I admonish you as my dearest children.  For if you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet not many fathers. For in Christ Jesus, by the gospel, I have begotten you. Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ.

 --Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 4:9-16

Saint Thomas, pray for us.

Saint Thomas Edmund, pray for us.

All the other things in the world

 No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world. --Aristotle 

The Tree of Life

 "The nuns taught us there were two ways through life,

the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.
Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things. The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end."

--Mrs. O'Brien in The Tree of Life

Feast of Saint Lucy

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind couldn't detect.

--Mark Twain in Joan of Arc

Saint Lucy, pray for us! 
(Happy birthday, Kris!)

Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas, pray for us!

Gaudete Sunday

Never neglect any occasion God sends you of doing the good you can. Great charity, like every other great virtue, does not consist in doing extraordinary things, or waiting for extraordinary circumstances; it depends on doing with all our heart the good we have the chance of doing at every moment within our own homes and outside of them.

--Reverend Bernard O'Reilly in The Mirror of True Womanhood

Friendship

Friendship consists in forgetting what one gives, and remembering what one receives.

--Alexandre Dumas

True Charity

True charity consists in doing good to those who do us evil, and in thus winning them over.

--Saint Alphonsus Liguori

Messenger

 

Love was meant to be also a sign, a symbol, a messenger, a telltale of the Divine. Love is a messenger from God saying that every human affection and and every ecstasy of love are sparks from the great flame of love that is God.

--Archbishop Fulton Sheen