No Greater Love

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Remain in my love.

If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, 

just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love.

I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.

This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this: To lay down ones life for a friend.
I no longer call you slaves...I call you friends.
John 15:9-15

The Familiar Road

I'll walk down this familiar road,

the same one as before

But so much has changed since last time,

it's changed me at the core

Understanding and Love

Understanding and Love. One, a gift of the Holy Spirit. The other, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the one from which all others flow. In this light, they seem so interconnected as to be inseparable. In normal context, though, they seem too diverse to be related. I insist that the first is true - that love and understand are so tightly-bound that they cannot exist without the other. Nobody can love without understanding and, more importantly, no one can understand without loving.

In God's Hands

I'd like to start off with a special recognition: Tori is my best friend and words can't describe how much she means to me and how glad I am that she's in my life! And I could write so much more, but it'd never do her justice. 

Adoring and Remembering

Today is Monday. For the rest of you up here at SFU, that means simple adoration is going on for a good 8 1/2 hours. Like the good Catholic I am, I recently stopped in for my personal time with Jesus. There's something about simple adoration that sets it apart from a normal holy hour. Is it the freedom? The knowledge that I can stay as long or as little as I please? Maybe it's the intimacy - for the majority of my time in the chapel, I was alone with Jesus. Perhaps, today at least, that's a good thing.

The Battlefield

We are all called to be warriors.

We are all called to fight in something greater than any human conflict. We are soldiers in the fight - the quintessential fight between good and evil, light and dark, life and death.

Don't think that because the terms are so vast, this "war" is a metaphor. It is not an abstract concept of "doing good" but a very real fight. It is a fight raging around us all the time, in every place and every time throughout the whole of history. 

The best part is...we've already won.

Coming Home Twice in One Week

Last Tuesday, I went back to good ol' Pittsburgh for the first (real) time all year. I went home. Today, I went home again, to Loretto.

The Nature of the Beast

Temptation...it's something we all have, whether we are the worst of sinners or the holiest of saints. Sometimes we are tempted to "little" things (though no sin is really "little"), sometimes...not so much.

And, like it or not, we all fall sometimes. Quite often, for the vast majority of us. Proverbs 24:16 says that even the just man falls seven times (seven, in Hebrew connotation, meaning "a LOT").

It's not even as though we will one day hit a point where we won't have to deal with the effects of original sin - there is no plateau of "permanent holiness" where we can freeze with our eyes to heaven and our hands folded like a saint statue. Even Saint Francis, widely considered the holiest mortal to live besides Mary, struggled constantly with temptation. We all have demons to wrestle.

Can I get yo num-bah?

Alright, so I've been thinking a lot about people lately. I think there are some things I need to say to some of them. I won't call them by name, because I'm cool like that...but hopefully (but probably not) they will read this and know it's them.

Trombones on Ice

I can't remember what I normally do on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I feel like there's usually something though...Thursday dinner, Friday Christmas tree, Saturday...??? Either way, I can guarantee that whatever it is, it's not what I did today.

The Christmas Tree

So I know it's weird to have two posts in like ten minutes, but they're about different things so shush.

Today we carried out our Black Friday tradition of putting up and decorating the Christmas tree, and that really got me thinking. It doesn't seem that long ago I did this the last time, a year ago. Isn't it funny how when we're little a month is an unspeakably long time, let alone a year...and now here I am hanging the same ornament on the tree 12 months later and hardly feeling it.

Things were so much different 12 months ago.

Amor Vincit Omnia

Amor vincit omnia. Latin for "Love conquers all"

Honestly, the hardest part about making this was choosing a name. It was like naming a child, only much more difficult. I knew I wanted it to be based on something a saint said, or something saint-like. Why? Not really sure. Finally, Tori said if she had a blog, it would be called Love Conquers All. So, I stole that one. Our #samepersonsyndrome means I'm allowed to do that.