than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.
Tonight we have our meeting with Confirmation Candidates and parents, which we will begin with this prayer to the Holy Spirit attributed to St. Augustine. It's a great prayer for beginnings and in moments of need:
The Holy Spirit from St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican
Breathe in us, O Holy Spirit, that our thoughts may be holy. Act in us, O Holy Spirit, that our work too may be holy. Draw our hearts, O Holy Spirit, that we may love but what is holy. Strengthen us, O Holy Spirit, to defend all that is holy. Guard us then, O Holy Spirit, that we always may be holy. Amen.
Continuing our series of looking at websites on Wednesday, we turn our gaze to a website focused on praying through the daily mass readings: Pray.nd.edu. Run by the University of Notre Dame, my alma mater, "Pray" includes different content every day, centered around the Gospel for that particular day. Each day, you find the text for the Gospel, a brief reflection written by someone connected to the University, and a prayer.
One of the strengths of this website is the sheer number of contributors. Tapping into the vast resource of Notre Dame students, alums, and friends, Pray has featured past Notre Dame football stars, current students, priests and religious, and of course alumni. Hearing from many different individuals keeps the site fresh. There are "as many ways [to God] as there are people," as Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) once said. The different perspectives allow us to see God with new eyes.
Let's take a look at a few of the other parts of the site.
Seasonal Sections
During Advent and Lent, "Pray" features videos for each week of the season. Each video includes a well thought out, well delivered ~5 minute reflection on a particular aspect that shines forth in that week's mass readings. I particularly enjoyed the one for the 2nd week of Advent:
Free Online Prayer Cards
Ever hit a patch where you don't know how you want to pray, don't feel like you have time to pray, and need to pray something short and meaningful? So do I. The prayer card section on the Pray website is an incredible resource for people in that spot. Each prayer card is a PDF that can be printed out, cut, and folded up to fit in your wallet. Here's an example of one of the prayers, a prayer for healing (PDF):
A great resource for Catholics on the go (they'll send you daily emails) or Catholics not on the go (watching videos), Pray.nd.edu can help you grow closer to God day by day.
If you have a website you recommend, leave a comment or send Isaac an email:
The following is used by permission from the blog Echoing Hope, written by Jonathan Lewis, a DRE in Mill Valley, CA.
Matthew 22: 15-21
In today’s Gospel passage the Jewish leaders are trying to trick Jesus into getting in trouble with the government (Roman Empire) by trying to get him to say that a person need not pay taxes (since paying taxes wasn’t one of the Jewish laws).
Jesus responds by asking them: whose face is imprinted on the coins? When they respond “Caesar” He tells them that they should “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God”.
It is important as Christians for us to live a life of justice: giving each person what is owed to them. But how do we give God what belongs to Him? What belongs to God? We believe that God created the world, every person, and everything. Every day God continues to give us life and love as a free gift. While Caesar’s face was imprinted on coins, the face of God is imprinted on each of our hearts. We are called to give God our whole selves, everything that we are, nothing less. We do this by resembling God in our thoughts, words and actions.
