Daily Reflection – It’s Really an Adventure
Daily Reflection – Are You Better Today Than You Were Yesterday?
Daily Reflection – Living Without Knowing
Ascension Presents – Why God Allows Us to Learn from Our Mistakes
God is quick to forgive, and he’s given us the gift of confession so we can return to a relationship with him after sin. But this love he has for us is so great that he never wants us to be caught by sin again, which is why he allows our sins to have consequences. Just like your parents would teach you why something is wrong, God helps us build knowledge of sin and its consequences by letting us experience them. Without learning from our mistakes, we would just keep falling into the same sins, separating us from a relationship with God.
Today, Fr. Mike explains why God lets us learn from our mistakes, and how it shows the depth of his mercy.
Ascension Presents – Look! Squirrel!!
Even with four hours a day of prayer, Fr. Malachy still gets distracted.
After his mind would wander off on one tangent after another, he brought this problem to his spiritual director. But, the director told him, God took great joy in seeing Fr. Malachy turn to him over and over again, choosing Jesus tangent after tangent.
A great analogy for distraction in prayer is a baby learning to walk. The baby is going to fall over and over again, but the parents triumph in every step the baby takes because they know how hard it is for the baby to overcome the obstacles and master the challenge of walking. In prayer, we are going to get distracted over and over, but the Lord is overjoyed by every moment where we turn back to him because he knows how hard the world, the flesh, and the devil make it to pray.
When you get distracted, just get up and turn back to Jesus. Eventually focusing on him will become as easy as walking. After a while, you will begin to learn to turn your heart to Jesus naturally and choose him instead of distraction.
Slow down your mind. Instead of fighting distraction after distraction, take each step slowly. An occasional “squirrel” may cross your mind, but you will be able to refocus on Jesus if you take it slow. Then, before you know it, you won’t just be walking to Jesus in your prayer. You’ll be able to run to him and with him.
With that, Fr. Malachy says farewell and offers you his blessing as he travels to Nicaragua to continue his mission with the CFRs there. This may be his last video on Ascension Presents.
Ascension Presents – Prayer Ain’t Easy
Growing up Fr. Mike thought prayer should be like soaking in a hot tub. He didn’t understand why it was so hard when he tried it.
It took him a while to learn that, as the Catechism says, prayer is a gift of grace and a determined response on our part. Prayer always presupposes effort. There’s always some kind of engagement when we properly pray to God. It’s not just about soaking in God’s grace. The required effort in prayer is difficult more often than it is not. Prayer is a battle against ourselves and “the wiles of the tempter who does all he can to turn man away from prayer” (CCC 2725).
Over time, Fr. Mike discovered that prayer needs to be more than a momentary time where we seek solace and closeness with God. We need to constantly acknowledge our relationship with God throughout the day, just as a husband and wife are constantly thinking of each other. Then when we do set aside time to simply be with God, it happens more naturally.
If you want to improve your prayer life, make the intentional and faithful decision to live the same way outside of prayer as you do within prayer.
Read “The Battle of Prayer” section in the Catechism.
Ascension Presents – When You Don’t Understand the Bible
Have you ever read the Bible and thought to yourself, “wait… what?”
Oftentimes in Christian media we see what Fr. Mike dubs a “Hallmark” version of following Christ. There’s struggle and hardship, but then God’s grace comes in and cures everything, making everything nearly perfect for the characters in the story. While these types of stories make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, they’re not very realistic. And while God’s grace is essential, it’s not a magic wand that makes everything bad go away.
There are some stories in the Bible that at first glance appear dark, difficult, or just don’t make sense. Even some of the things Christ says to his followers can sound harsh or even scandalous at times. But it’s in these moments of confusion and concern that God wants to teach us something.
This was something that St. Augustine struggled with before his conversion. It wasn’t until after he had accepted the faith and began to intentionally practice it that he realized it’s not God’s word that’s wrong, it’s our interpretation of it. He gives us 7 things to do when trying to understand a passage we’re unsure of:
1. Read the text in the original language. Or, if you’re not a scholar of Greek or Latin (more than likely), at least realize that a lot can be lost in translation, like idioms and turns of phrase, or context and foreign references.
2. Try different biblical translations and see how they compare.
3. Weigh what you’re reading with all of scripture (it’s ALL connected!)
4. Be humble and accept that you don’t know everything needed to fully understand God’s word (and that’s okay).
5. Sacred tradition always trumps our own interpretations.
6. Don’t take figurative language literally.
7. Don’t universalize a parable to be relevant for all situations in life.
The Bible wasn’t written by Hallmark. It was inspired by God. Hallmark is meant to help you escape reality. The Bible is meant to help you get back in touch with reality. There’s going to be brokenness, and sin, and unhappy endings, but there will also be real grace that transforms those hardships into strength, and it has the power to change your life.
Dynamic Catholic Presents – A Gospel Cliffhanger
The Script Isn’t Finished
Have you ever been really invested in a movie and then it leaves off with a sudden cliffhanger?
Turns out, the Gospels did it first. Today, the rich young man eagerly seeks Jesus’ advice, but when Jesus asks much of him, he just walks away sad.
Does the story really end there? Matthew doesn’t think so.
Because our no’s to God don’t have to be the final page in our own stories…
Minute Meditation – Blessed Are All the Saints
Jesus left no formal religious rule for his followers. The closest he came was his proclamation of the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers….
Francis took to heart this spiritual vision and translated it into a way of life. In various ways, other saints before and since have done the same. But for many men and women since the time of Francis, his particular example has offered a distinctive key to the Gospel—or, as Pope Francis might say, “a new way of seeing and interpreting reality.” Among the central features of this key: the vision of a Church that is “poor and for the poor”; a resolve to take seriously Jesus’s example of self-emptying love; the way of mercy and compassion; above all, a determination to proclaim the Gospel not only with words but with one’s life.
—from the book The Franciscan Saints by Robert Ellsberg
Daily Reflection – Become a Faithful Friend
