Daily Thoughts 4/15/19

I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I’m supposed to do, what I can do.

I used to pray for answers, but now I’m praying for strength.

I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.       

Mother Teresa.

Daily Thoughts 4/14/19

In the letter to the Philippians we read about how Jesus, as the Eternal Word, was equal to God and yet didn’t desire to hold onto that position, choosing instead to draw near to us as one of us. The great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner said as much when he talked about how awe-inspiring it is to consider that when God wanted to be something other than God, God became human. How glorious and profound a truth- God voluntarily surrenders control, power, and the like in order to show us how awesome it is to be human. Whereas we strive so hard not to be human, it is that identity and reality that God most wanted to experience. And he did so out of love for us.  Daniel P Horan OFM, Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent and Easter, Passion (Palm) Sunday

From Thomas Merton

“What we are – our identity – is only truly known to God – not ourselves, not to other men. The greatest terror of the particular judgment is that, the moment after our death we instantly appear before the face of God and learn our identity – truly; we finally see ourselves as we really are! The measure of our identity, of our being (the two are the same) is the amount of our love for God.” Thomas Merton