Pilgrim progress- a disciple on a journey!

Taking time out to look at all the blessings we have in our lives is never a bad idea! In fact, it is such a good idea that it is written into our Rule of Life that each month we are to take a day of spiritual recollection to reflect over the month that has passed and prepare to live the new one with a grateful heart. I had the gift of living that day of recollection today so I had ample time to pray in Adoration and bask in God's generosity and mercy. On our recollection days we keep silence, during meals and about the house so as to create a climate of prayer, listening and respect for the journey that each sister is making. Sitting in prayer, I looked over the past few weeks and  see how stressed I have been about various situations. Nothing seriously life-changing but little things that piled together became big things. There have been numerous visits to the dentist, administration problems, health insurance policies not updated, crossed wires (sometimes burnt wires!), the...

Apse, Irish College, Rome In Ireland on the 6th of November, we celebrate the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland. Pope Benedict XV beatified Oliver Plunkett in 1920 and during his papacy also (1914-22) the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland was instituted. The same Pope also granted Ireland the honour of having a litany of its native saints approved for public recitation. Only four saints, St Malachy (1094-1148), St Lawrence O'Toole (1128-80) and St Oliver Plunkett (1625-81) and St Charles of Mount Argus (1821-93), have been officially canonised. All the other Irish saints, such as Saints Patrick, Brigid, and Colmcille, are saints, as it were, by acclamation of the local Church. The scope of this feast, while it includes canonised saints, is wider. It also includes those who had a reputation for holiness and whose causes for canonisation have not yet been completed, such as Blessed Thaddeus MacCarthy (1455-92), the seventeen Irish martyrs of the 16th and 17th centuries, Bless...

Over the past few days there seems to be a recurrent theme of Scripture passages where Jesus is out dining or even invites himself to dinner! The Gospel both today and yesterday and tomorrow invite us to reflect on whom we welcome or don’t welcome in our homes. We are called to the hospitality of the heart. Yesterday we had the story of Zacchaeus. It is the story of the hospitality of God shining a light into Zacchaeus’ darkness. Jesus goes to eat at the house of a tax collector. This story presents two kinds of “lostness.” There is the lostness of Zacchaeus, a social outcast, a man who suffers from a different kind of poverty than we normally think of—and there is the lostness of the crowd, which we need to identify with ourselves. We who call ourselves Christians are not immune to this kind of lostness. Often, we judge and we look-down-upon, we fold our arms and we distance ourselves, and we make little biting comments about each other to others or in our own minds. Yet Zacc...