miniZibaldone

A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor Oh God please make my mind clear. Please make it clean. I ask You for a greater love for my holy Mother and I ask her for a greater love for You. Please help me to get down under things and find where You are. I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You. Please do not let the explanations of the psychologists about this make it turn suddenly cold. My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be. Please help all the ones I love to be free from their suffering. Please forgive me.

"A person who is poor in spirit has nothing except one thing for which and by which he is made: endless aspiration. This is openness and willingness: boundless expectation. It is not boundless because the heap of things one expects is endless. No, he does not expect anything, but lives a boundless openness, and he does not expect anything! […] It’s as if in that meadow, we imagined a person who is poor in spirit, and we would have to imagine him sitting there with his legs spread, his face up, looking at the sky, the earth, the mountains, and everything, with this total dilation of his heart without any set image in mind: ‘Well, I would like a roof, a home, a wife, children, money.’ Nothing, there is nothing! This is the original nature of the human person, and in fact the original nature of the human person is expectation of the infinite." Those who live the encounter with Christ have discovered the future good, which in any case remains a mystery, because in no way can we d...

From 2023 Christmas Midnight Mass Homily of Pope Francis Let the seed of the Incarnation bloom within us Brothers and sisters, tonight we might ask ourselves: Which God do we believe in? In the God of incarnation or the god of achievement? Because there is always a risk that we can celebrate Christmas while thinking of God in pagan terms, as a powerful potentate in the sky; a god linked to power, worldly success, and the idolatry of consumerism. With the false image of a distant and petulant deity who treats the good well and the bad poorly; a deity made in our own image and likeness, handy for resolving our problems and removing our ills. God, on the other hand, waves no magic wand; he is no god of commerce who promises “everything all at once”. He does not save us by pushing a button, but draws near us, in order to change our world from within.... Dear brother, dear sister, to God, who changed history in the course of a census, you are not a number, but a face. Your name is written o...

Advent 2023,  December 22