Daily Reflection – Jesus Helps Us in Our Daily Battle with Problems
Daily Reflection – We Have Hard Battles to Fight
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.
Daily Reflection – Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle
Daily Reflection – Life is Messy
Meditation of the Day – A Battle Against the Forces of Evil
There’s No Storm that God Won’t Carry You Through
Meditation of the Day – You Cannot Win a Battle by Mere Flight
“Many try to fly away from temptations only to fall more deeply into them; for you cannot win a battle by mere flight. It is only by patience and humility that you will be strengthened against the enemy. Those who shun them outwardly and do not pull them out by the roots will make no progress; for temptations will soon return to harass them and they will be in a worse state. It is only gradually—with patience and endurance and with God’s grace—that you will overcome temptations sooner than by your own efforts and anxieties . . . Gold is tried by fire and the upright person by temptation. Often we do not know what we can do until temptation shows us what we are . . . This is how temptation is: first we have a thought, followed by strong imaginings, then the pleasure and evil emotions, and finally consent. This is how the enemy gains full admittance, because he was not resisted at the outset. The slower we are to resist, the weaker we daily become and the stronger the enemy is against us.”— Thomas à Kempis, p. 32-33
//The Catholic Company//
Meditation of the Day – Christian Life is a Retreat
“Christian life is a retreat. We are ‘not of this world’, just as Jesus Christ is ‘not of this world’ (John 17:14). What is the world? It is, as St. John said, the ‘lust of the flesh’, that is, sensuality and corruption in our desires and deeds; ‘the lust of the eyes’, curiosity, avarice, illusion, fascination, error, and folly in the affectation of learning, and, finally, pride and ambition (1 John 2:16). To these evils of which the world is full, and which make up its substance, a retreat must be set in opposition. We need to make ourselves into a desert by a holy detachment. Christian life is a battle … We must never cease to fight. In this battle, St. Paul teaches us to make an eternal abstinence, that is, to cut ourselves off from the pleasures of the senses and guard our hearts from them … it was to repair and to expiate the failings of our retreat, of our battle against temptations, of our abstinence, that Jesus was driven into the desert. His fast of forty days prefigured the lifelong one that we are to practice by abstaining from evil deeds and by containing our desires within the limits laid down by the law of God.”— Bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, p. 17-18
Meditation of the Day – A Path of Roses and Honey
