Pilgrim progress- a disciple on a journey!

This is from the talk I prepared for Radio Maria in February 2017 as part of a 6 part series on Beauty. Week 3- Beauty and Suffering This week we are going to look at Beauty and Suffering. It might sound very strange to put these two things together, without sounding slightly sadistic. You hear a lot about happiness these days. You have to be happy 24/7. You have to only do the things you love. You have to wake up everyday and jump out of bed, because if not, you’re broken or you’re unhappy or not motivated. While I certainly wish that were the case, the fact of the matter is, it’s unrealistic. We can’t always be happy, we can’t always do the stuff we love, we can’t always wake up every day feeling like we can take on the world. While there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be happy, we all too often make that our main objective in life. And in our quest for bliss and contentment we fail to embrace the beauty of suffering, when we are faced with it. One of the l...

For a thousand years, until the publication of the Imitation of Christ, the Confessions of Saint Augustine was the most common manual on the spiritual life.  It has had more readers than any of St. Augustine’s other works.  He wrote his Confessions ten years after converting, and after being a priest for eight years.  In it, St. Augustine confesses to God, narrating the writing addressed to Him.   St. Augustine admits to God:  “Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new.  Late have I loved Thee” (Confessions, Chapter 10). The text continues: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!  You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.  In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all....

  Lust’s opposing virtue, chastity, deserves an equally unforgettable advocate. St. Maria Goretti knew the importance of chastity for union with God and its necessity for the wholesomeness of both personal and social life. Today we commemorate her in the liturgy of the Church. In every age, the saints of God have proven that they were God’s servants by their lives of faith and purity of soul. In St. Maria Goretti, youth have a heavenly patroness who, in Pope John Paul’s words, is "a model of Christian life," "a model of authentic holiness," and "the Agnes of the 20th century." Not yet 12 years of age, she was a countercultural sign to a world in the process of rejecting God and genuine love.  In the 1947 Decree of Beatification of the Congregation of Rites (a section of which was transformed in 1969 into the Congregation for the Causes of Saints), we read the following concerning the heroic virtue of the young girl who died after being stabbed 14 times...

Already at the second week of Lent, the liturgy presents us with varying images for the journey. Sunday is the day in my week where I  stop and take stock of how the journey is going. We are on a Lenten pilgrimage but from where and towards where? Pope John Paul II writes in Incarnationis Mysterium 7: “A pilgrimage evokes the believer's personal journey in the footsteps of the Redeemer: it is an exercise of practical asceticism, of repentance for human weaknesses, of constant vigilance over one's own frailty, of interior preparation for a change of heart. Through vigils, fasting and prayer, the pilgrim progresses along the path of Christian perfection, striving to attain, with the support of God's grace, “the state of the perfect man, to the measure of the full maturity of Christ” (Eph 4:13).” A pilgrim needs to be able to read the signs of the times around them, of the people with whom they live and journey with and of nature itself. A few years ago, a friend of min...

No, you didn't read the title wrong...the Rose of Lima, not the Rose of Tralee. This evening, a familiar tune will drift through the televisions of many Irish households and through the internet for many other international followers. As a tenor belts out the words “The pale moon was rising…” this haunting melody signals that the new Rose of Tralee had been crowned. The Rose of Tralee International Festival is a week long festival and is one of Ireland's largest and longest running festivals. It is based around the selection of the Rose of Tralee, an international event that encompasses young women of Irish descent from Ireland and around the world. People sometimes ask if the Rose of Tralee Festival is a beauty pageant. As their website states, “The Rose of Tralee Festival is a multifaceted event that celebrates the many attributes of modern young Irish women.” When we were younger, we all wanted to be a ‘Rose’, to dress up in a beautiful dress and share our story with t...

We’re counting down the days to the visit of the Rise of the Roses National Tour to our community on the 11 th of July 2015!So what is Rise of the Roses? The girls write: “We are a group of girls who met through the Michaela Foundation- writing and delivering the faith element of the girls’ summer camps and retreats. Through our work we discovered a tremendous thirst for God amongst the young girls of Ireland. There is an eagerness to know God and a huge amount of energy and joy that is palpable when these young girls embrace their faith.We hope to visit 10 Convents all around Ireland on 10 consecutive Saturdays during the summer of 2015 from 13 th of June-15 th of August. We begin at St Brigid’s Shrine in Faughart, Co. Louth. St. Brigid directly influenced several other future saints of Ireland, and her many religious communities helped to secure the country's conversion to the Catholic faith. At each Convent we will invite young people and their families to joi...

A popular quote we hear but may find hard to understand is the phrase “Beauty will save the world.” It was Fydor Dostoyevsky, the Russian novelist, who composed this enigmatic phrase. However, when has it ever happened in the course of history that beauty had saved anyone from anything? Indeed, beauty had provided embellishment or has uplifted but how will it save the world? In today’s world, t here is huge pressure on people to look perfect and beautiful. From plastic surgery to smoothing skin and erasing wrinkles to enlarging muscles and slimming waists, airbrushing, or "photoshopping,”, the bombardment does not do much for self-esteem. These images don’t reflect reality, yet from a younger and younger age, people are aspiring to these biologically impossible ideals, dangerously so. These are distortions of truth. If only people would realise that for 2000 years, God has been telling each one of us that we are beautiful in His eyes because we are created in the im...