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If you were to rise early every morning, as an instance of self-denial, as a method of renouncing indulgence, as a means of redeeming your time, and fitting your spirit for prayer, you would find mighty advantages from it. This method, though it seem such a small circumstance of life, would in all probability
be a means of great piety. It would keep it constantly in your head, that softness and idleness were to be avoided, that self-denial was a part of Christianity… It would teach you to exercise power over yourself, and make you able by degrees to renounce other pleasures and tempers that war against the soul.
- William Law (1686-1761), A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
Early morning prayer, before activating the mind with other concerns, is a time-tested
way to draw closer to God. If you're not already doing so, give it a try. |
Daily Readings
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4 and 6 Luke
9:22-25 Jesus said to his disciples:
‘The Son of Man is destined to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and to be put to death, and to be raised up on the third day.’
Then to all he said:
‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, that
man will save it. What gain, then, is it for a man to have won the whole world and to have lost or ruined his very self?’
Praying the Daily Gospels: A Guide to Meditation, by Philip St. Romain, 2018 (3rd ed.) Luke 9: 22-25: Take up your
cross! Jesus tried to help his disciples realize that his commitment to love would lead him into a fatal conflict with the authorities of his day. Dying to ourselves for the sake of love will lead us, with Jesus, to new life. • Make a list of those personal traits which you need to change for the sake of love. Which of these most frustrates your efforts at
loving? • Pray for the grace to change destructive behaviors.
Treatise on the Love of God, by St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) ____________ BOOK VI: OF THE EXERCISES OF LOVE IN PRAYER Chapter 13: Of the wound of love.
This heart in love with its God, desiring infinitely to love, sees notwithstanding that it can neither
love nor desire sufficiently. And this desire which cannot come to effect is as a dart in the side of a noble spirit; yet the pain which proceeds from it is welcome, because whosoever desires earnestly to love, loves also earnestly to desire, and would esteem himself the most miserable man in the universe, if he did not continually desire to love that which is so sovereignly worthy of love. Desiring to love, he receives pain; but loving to desire, he receives
sweetness.
My God! Theotimus, what am I going to say? The blessed in heaven seeing that God is still more lovable than they are loving, would fail and eternally perish with a desire to love him still more, if the most holy will of God did not impose upon theirs the admirable repose which it enjoys: for they so sovereignly love this sovereign will, that its willing stays theirs, and the divine contentment contents them, they acquiescing to be limited in their love even by
that will whose goodness is the object of their love. If this were not so, their love would be equally delicious and dolorous, delicious by the possession of so great a good, dolorous through an extreme desire of a greater love. God therefore continually drawing arrows, if we may say so, out of the quiver of his infinite beauty, wounds the hearts of his lovers, making them clearly see that they do not love him nearly as much as he is worthy to be beloved. That mortal who does not desire to love
the divine goodness more, loves him not enough; sufficiency in this divine exercise is not sufficient, when a man would stay in it as though it sufficed him.
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