Grace is constantly present, and is rooted in us, and worked into us like leaven, from our earliest years, until the thing thus present becomes fixed in a person like a natural endowment, as if it were one substance with the person. But, for one's own good, it manages one in many different ways, after its own pleasure.
- Pseudo-Macarius, Homily I, 5th C

(How is God's grace being "worked into" you lately?) 

ROM 7:18-25;    PS 119:66, 68, 76, 77, 93, 94;    LK 12:54-59

R. Lord, teach me your statutes.

Teach me wisdom and knowledge,
for in your commands I trust.

You are good and bountiful;
teach me your statutes.

Let your kindness comfort me
according to your promise to your servants.

Let your compassion come to me that I may live,
for your law is my delight.

Never will I forget your precepts,
for through them you give me life.

I am yours; save me,
for I have sought your precepts.







In our daily life, these many centuries after the coming of Jesus, we believers can lose the sense of urgency associated with the preaching of Jesus. Yet, the call to attend to the Lord in the present moment is no less vital. In his work, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis meditates on the importance of living in the present moment, while revealing the temptation of dwelling on the past, but, above all, the temptation which pulls us to focus on the future. "The Present is the point at which time touches eternity," he says, adding, ". . . the Future is, of all things, the least like eternity." 

How well we know the the paralysis of thinking about the future!  We can find ourselves absorbed by thoughts, concerns and worries about the future.  Such paralysis takes us out of the present which, ironically, is the place where we are most sure of encountering God.

Where is the Lord waiting to encounter us today?  He waits in the place and circumstances in which we stand right now.  "Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?"  Now is the time, this is the place!

- by Fr. Richard Gabuzda

Selected Quotes from St. John of the Cross on the Journey of the Soul to God by Contemplation

- from Dark Night of the Soul

Bk. 2,  Ch. 8. #1. If the soul sometimes prays it does so with such lack of strength and sweetness that it thinks that God neither hears it nor pays heed to it. Indeed, this is no time for the soul to speak with God; it should rather put its mouth in the dust, and endure its purgation with patience. It has such distractions and times of such profound forgetfulness of the memory that frequent periods pass by without its knowing what it has been doing or thinking. 

#2. This unknowing and forgetfulness are caused by the interior recollection wherein this contemplation absorbs the soul.

- compiled by James and Tyra Arraj