Feast of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, 988 Can the love of Christ move a Christian to fruitful, effective, full-time, read more

Feast of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, 988 Can the love of Christ move a Christian to fruitful, effective, full-time, unpaid service to those who belong to Him? I have no hesitation in answering, Yes, it can, and it must. St. Paul wrote, "The very spring of our actions is the love of Christ. We look at it this way: if one died for all men, then in a sense, they all died; and his purpose in dying for them is that their lives should now be no longer lived for themselves but for Him who died and rose again for them." There is the motive. Can anyone doubt that St. Paul's ministry was fruitful -- in wisdom, in Christ-like character, in testimony to the power of the Spirit of Christ -- or effective -- in conversions, in churches planted, in men raised up to carry on the work? Yet St. Paul spent long hours working with his hands to support himself. He served Christ, therefore, as an "amateur". Dare we say he was not really a "full time" worker? Or was he not really "unpaid"?

Commemoration of Martyrs of Japan, 1597 The deepest need of men is not food and clothing and shelter, important read more

Commemoration of Martyrs of Japan, 1597 The deepest need of men is not food and clothing and shelter, important as they are. It is God. We have mistaken the nature of poverty, and thought it was economic poverty. No, it is poverty of soul, deprivation of God's recreating, loving peace. Peer into poverty and see if we are really getting down to the deepest needs, in our economic salvation schemes. These are important. But they lie farther along the road, secondary steps toward world reconstruction. The primary step is a holy life, transformed and radiant in the glory of God.

Commemoration of Charles de Foucauld, Hermit, Servant of the Poor, 1916 Whilst you are divided betwixt God and read more

Commemoration of Charles de Foucauld, Hermit, Servant of the Poor, 1916 Whilst you are divided betwixt God and the world, you have neither the pleasures of Religion, nor the pleasures of the world, but are always in the uneasiness of a divided state of heart. You have only so much Religion as serves to disquiet you, to show you a handwriting on the wall, to interrupt your pleasures, and to appear as a death's-head at all your feasts, but not Religion enough to give you a taste and feeling of its pleasures. You dare not wholly neglect Religion, but then you take no more than is just sufficient to keep you from being a terror to yourself, and you are as loth to be very good as you are fearful to be very bad.

Feast of Benedict of Nursia, Father of Western Monasticism, c.550 To be prayerless is to be without God, read more

Feast of Benedict of Nursia, Father of Western Monasticism, c.550 To be prayerless is to be without God, without Christ, without grace, without hope, and without heaven.

Feast of Richard Hooker, Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher, 1600 Commemoration of Martin of Porres, Dominican Friar, 1639 Faith keeps read more

Feast of Richard Hooker, Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher, 1600 Commemoration of Martin of Porres, Dominican Friar, 1639 Faith keeps the soul at a holy distance from these infinite depths of divine wisdom, where it profits more by reverence and holy fear than any can do by their utmost attempt to draw nigh to that inaccessible light wherein these glories of the divine nature do dwell.

Feast of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Teacher, Martyr, 1945 During the last year or so, I have come to appreciate the read more

Feast of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Teacher, Martyr, 1945 During the last year or so, I have come to appreciate the "worldliness" of Christianity as never before. The Christian is not a homo religiosus but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus became man... It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman, a righteous man, or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one... This is what I mean by worldliness -- taking life in one's stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness... How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in this world?

The evil of riches, then, for institutions, for nations, for individuals, is that those who possess or seek to possess read more

The evil of riches, then, for institutions, for nations, for individuals, is that those who possess or seek to possess almost invariably overvalue possessions and so cease to live creatively. They stop loving God with all the heart and all the soul and all the strength and all the mind. They stop loving their neighbors, too. When you find a person of means who is not either a self-centered bore or a low person, you may know that God has worked a miracle.

Feast of Anskar, Archbishop of Hamburg, Missionary to Denmark and Sweden, 865 Let a man but separate himself from read more

Feast of Anskar, Archbishop of Hamburg, Missionary to Denmark and Sweden, 865 Let a man but separate himself from all contingencies and from all works, and there will come over him in this state of emptiness a peace which is very great, lovely, and agreeable, and which is in itself no sin since it is part of our human nature. But when it is taken for a veritable possessing of God, or unity with God, then it is sin, for it is in reality nothing else than a state of thorough passivity and apathy untouched by the power from on high -- a purely negative state from which (if one in arrogance calls it divine) nothing follows but blindness, failure of understanding, and a disinclination to be governed by the rules of ordinary righteousness.

Feast of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, Teacher, 1944 There is no hope of establishing a Christian social order read more

Feast of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, Teacher, 1944 There is no hope of establishing a Christian social order except through the labour and sacrifice of those in whom the Spirit of Christ is active.