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