Gaudete Sunday

Rejoice! Christmas is near!

Saint Lucy

Seven years ago today, on her feast day, Saint Lucy answered my prayers and through her intercession my children and I now live in the home which we call "Rivendell"; a photograph of Saint Lucy's shrine in Syracuse has its place of honor on a little table near our front door in thanksgiving for this great favor.

It is also my youngest sister Kris's birthday: through Saint Lucy's intercession, she was cured of hemorrhage in her eye when she was only a few days old. Happy birthday, Kris!

Saint Lucy, thank you; and please pray for us.

Love sustains the world

“Faith in God opens man up to the horizon of a certain hope,” on which we can rely, so as to “abandon ourselves with trust into the hands of the Love that sustains the world.”

--Pope Benedict XVI, in a recent letter to the president of the Italian bishops' conference Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco

Thank you, Padre Steve for the original post: http://salesianity.blogspot.com/2009/12/pope-benedict-without-god-we-risk-our.html

Our Lady of Guadalupe

"Am I not here who am your Mother?
Are you not under my shadow and protection?
Am I not the fountain of your joy?
Are you not in the fold of my mantle, in the cradle of my arms?"

--words of Our Lady to Saint Juan Diego

Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, pray for us.

Snow on sand

“Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,

Nor time unmake what poets know.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Snow

“About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.”

--A. E. Housman

To be loved

"Love is sufficient of itself; it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in the practice. Of all the movements, sensations and feelings of the soul, love is the only one in which the creature can respond to the Creator and make some sort of similar return however unequal though it be. For when God loves, all He desires is to be loved in return. The sole purpose of His love is to be loved, in the knowledge that those who love Him are made happy by their love of Him."

--Saint Bernard of Clairvaux