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(I wish you) health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbour. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God.
Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.
- Johann von Goethe
(A wonderful blessing! Let it be a petition you pray to God for your sake, and for others.)
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Jas 2:1-9; Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7
Mk 8:27-33
Jesus and his disciples set out
for the villages of Caesarea Philippi.
Along the way he asked his disciples,
“Who do people say that I am?”
They said in reply,
“John the Baptist, others Elijah,
still others one of the prophets.”
And he asked them,
“But who do you say that I am?”
Peter said to him in reply,
“You are the Christ.”
Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him.
He began to teach them
that the Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days.
He spoke this openly.
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples,
rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
Praying the Daily Gospels: A Guide to Meditation, by Philip St. Romain, 2018 (3rd ed.)
Mark 8: 27-33 (Who do you say he is?)
This passage marks a turning point in Mark’s Gospel. The community, through Peter, asserts its faith in Jesus as the Messiah and, in turn, challenges all people to answer this most important of all questions for themselves.
• Who do you say Jesus was/is? Why do you believe this?
• You may find it helpful to write a short letter to Jesus. Thank him for being who he is for you.
Treatise on the Love of God, by St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
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BOOK II: THE HISTORY OF THE GENERATION AND HEAVENLY BIRTH OF DIVINE LOVE
Chapter 18: That love is exercised in penitence, at first, and that there are diverse sorts of penitence.
We may therefore well say, Theotimus, that penitence is a virtue wholly Christian, since on the one side it was so little known to the pagans, and, on the other side, it is so well recognized amongst true Christians, that in it consists a great part of the evangelical philosophy, according to which whosoever affirms that he sins not, is senseless, and whosoever expects without penitence to redress
his sin is mad; for it is our Saviour's exhortation of exhortations: Do penance. And now let me give a brief description of the progress of this virtue.
We enter into a profound apprehending of the fact that, as far as is in us, we offend God by our sins, despising and dishonouring him, giving way to disobedience and rebellion against him; and he also on his part considers himself as offended, irritated, and despised; for he dislikes, reproves and abominates iniquity. From this true apprehension there spring several motives, which all, or several
together, or each one apart, may carry us to this repentance.
For we consider sometimes how God who is offended has established a rigorous punishment in hell for sinners, and how he will deprive them of the paradise prepared for the good. And as the desire of paradise is extremely honourable, so the fear of losing it is an excellent fear; and not only so, but the desire of paradise being very worthy of esteem, the fear of its contrary, which is hell, is good and
praiseworthy. Ah! who would not dread so great a loss, so great a torment! And this double fear--the one servile, the other mercenary--greatly bears us on towards a repentance for our sins, by which we have incurred them. And to this effect in the Holy Word this fear is a hundred and a hundred times inculcated. At other times we consider the deformity and malice of sin, according as faith teaches us; for example, because by it the likeness and image of God which we have, is defiled and
disfigured, the dignity of our soul dishonoured, we are made like brute beasts, we have violated our duty towards the Creator of the world, forfeited the good of the society of the angels, to associate and subject ourselves to the devil, making ourselves slaves of our passions, overturning the order of reason, offending our good angels to whom we have so great obligations.
At other times we are provoked to repentance by the beauty of virtue, which brings as much good with it as sin does evil; further we are often moved to it by the example of the saints; for who could ever have cast his eyes upon the exercises of the incomparable penitence of Magdalen, of Mary of Egypt, or of the penitents of the monastery called Prison, described by S. John Climacus, without being moved to
repentance for his sins, since the mere reading of the history incites to it such as are not altogether insensible.
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