Oblate Program at Belmont Abbey, NC

Tag: love

Love and a Fully Human Existence

But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get… Read More ›

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God does help the blessed

Now even though we may have faith, hope and love, none of us can attain this state of blessedness by ourselves. Rather, blessed is the man – he alone attains blessedness – whose help is from you in rising to the heights of happiness on which he has set his heart. In other words, he… Read More ›

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A Person Who Loves His Neighbor Loves God

Children of the devil know how to cut us off from God, for they know that a person who loves his neighbor loves God. For this cause, as enemies of virtue, they sow in our hearts pretense about what is our own, and this becomes like kindling wood, filling us with great enmity against one… Read More ›

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Love the Lord your God

“You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul and your whole strength.” It seems to me that the love of the heart relates to a certain warmth of affection, the love of the soul to energy or judgement of reason, and the love of strength can refer to constancy… Read More ›

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Work for Total Abolition of War

What is the place of the Christian in all this? Is he simply to fold his hands and resign himself to the worst, accepting it as the inescapable will of God and preparing himself to enter heaven with a sigh of relief? Should he open up the apocalypse and run out into the street to… Read More ›

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The Measure of Love Authenticity

When the love of Jesus draws forth the best in us the lower appetites go into recession. It is not that we conquer them; they simply lose their capacity to charm us. . .. A devotional life that coexists with an unchallenged concern for personal comfort and advancement is likely to be spurious. The measures… Read More ›

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Who Cares for All Creation

When Abba Macarius was speaking openly to the brothers, he said: One time when I was in the wadi gathering palm branches, an antelope came up to me, tearing out its fur, weeping as though it were a he-goat, its tears flowing to the ground. It threw itself down on top of my feet and… Read More ›

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Immaculate Heart of Mary

Oh, Immaculate Heart! Help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of the people of today, and whose immeasurable effects already weigh down upon our modern world and seem to block the paths towards the future! From famine and war, deliver us. From nuclear war, from incalculable… Read More ›

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America’s Poor Are Its Most Generous Givers

WASHINGTON — When Jody Richards saw a homeless man begging outside a downtown McDonald’s recently, he bought the man a cheeseburger. There’s nothing unusual about that, except that Richards is homeless, too, and the 99-cent cheeseburger was an outsized chunk of the $9.50 he’d earned that day from panhandling. The generosity of poor people isn’t… Read More ›

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Let us take up arms against them courageously

Let us charge into the good fight with joy and love without being afraid of our enemies. Though unseen themselves, they can look at the face of our soul, and if they see it altered by fear, they take up arms against us all the more fiercely. For the cunning creatures have observed that we… Read More ›

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