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REDEMPTIVE SUFFERING
LIVING LAMPS BLOG
Consoling the Heart of Jesus in Our Suffering
Click on any of the tags below to read about a specific topic:
- Accidental Glory
- Catholic
- Christian Meditation
- Comfort the Sorrowful
- Communion of Saints
- Death
- Deeper Intimacy with God
- Degrees of Glory
- Divine Mercy
- Double Consequences of Sin
- Eternal Weight of Glory
- Faith
- Fee Will
- Final Judgment
- Four Last Things
- Free Will
- God
- Grief
- Healing Tears
- Heaven
- Hell
- Indulgences
- Judgment
- Living the Message of Fatima
- Living Water
- Mass is Source and Summit
- Mental Prayer
- Merit
- Mystical Body of Christ
- Offer it Up
- Our Blessed Mother
- Our Lady of Fatima
- Particular Judgment
- Penance
- personal witness
- Pray for the Dead
- Pray the Rosary
- Prayer for the Holy Souls in Purgatory
- purgatory
- Purgatory
- Purpose of Life
- Redemptive Suffering
- redemptive suffering
- Redemptive Suffering of the Saints
- reparation
- Rosary
- Sacrament of Reconciliation
- Saints
- Sanctification
- SSA
- Taking on the Strong Man
- temporal punishment
- The Angel of Peace
- The Church Militant
- The Church Suffering
- The Church Triumphant
- The Eucharist
- The Final Judgment
- The Four Last things
- The Gift of Tears
- The Good Shepherd
- The Holy Mass
- The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass
- The Mass
- The Most Blessed Sacrament
- The Particular Judgment
- The Pilgrim Church
- Works of Mercy
BLOG POSTS
(scroll down to read individual blog posts)
'I Knew God Was Reaching Out to Me'
Corpus Christi and the Mystical Body of Christ
“He Ain’t Heavy…”: Reflecting on the Death of My Brother
Grieving with Great Hope: Catholic Ministry for the Bereaved
I Leave It in His Hands
"The sun could have not risen that day and it would have been less surprising than what actually happened." Sammie Wood, a mother of three, homemaker, and cattle rancher from Clayton, New Mexico, spoke through tears as she recalled the events of Aug. 10, 2014.
Burying Mom: Grief, Temptation, Grace
Shocked, cheeks wet with tears, thoroughly pierced with grief, I drove in the late night to my parent’s home. I tried to imagine that my younger brother’s words spoken on the phone, “Mom is gone”, did not necessarily mean that she had died.
Free Will & Heaven
Even though we have been saved by Christ’s passion and death on the cross, we will not be able to enter heaven until we are fully able and willing not to sin and have learned how to completely align our will with God’s Will and doing only the good (not sin).
What the Church Teaches about Heaven
Every soul who has died in the love of God will enter heaven, either immediately after death or following a purification in purgatory. All souls will be perfectly happy in heaven, but some souls will enjoy a higher degree of happiness than others.
Combating Hedonism by Living the Message of Fatima
Our Lady came to Fatima to begin the formation of her “A Team” – a team of new “missionary disciples” who would be bright lights in a time of darkness, and by living an authentically Catholic life, would mission to people who had received a perverted form of the Catholic Faith through Modernism; disciples who would allow Jesus' victory over the Strongman to be fully effective in their lives. She knew it wouldn’t be easy for them because Hedonism – a direct consequence of Modernism – has infected everyone. The antidote is to respond to her urgent call to prayer, penance and reparation.
A Process of Offering Up Suffering
1. Enter into the Lord’s presence and ask for His insight and grace as you seek to understand and lean into your suffering for the sake of your own salvation and that of those whom God has placed in your care.
Our Union with the Holy Souls is Anchored Jesus’ Mercy
A few years ago, when I was associate pastor in a parish in Kentucky, I visited a Protestant funeral service with a priest friend of mine. The deceased was a woman who used to practice the Catholic Faith, but had recently joined that Christian community. The Protestant pastor, of course, knew about the woman’s background and I’m pretty sure I saw him do a double-look at us when we arrived wearing our clerical shirts. Along with some sermonizing and eulogizing, the pastor made the emphatic statement, “…but, there is nothing we can do for her now!” He repeated it and looked straight at us as he said it so that every word of it became a flaming dart. I half wanted to stand up and shout: “Yes there is! ‘[Our] sufferings fill up in (our) flesh what is still lacking in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of his body, which is the church,’ (cf Col. 1:24)” -but I didn’t.
My Mother Was a Priest
We were all shocked and shattered when my brother announced that he wanted to become a priest. It was not just that he wanted to become a priest, but he wanted to become a Cistercian priest. That meant that once he left home he would never return. Naturally my mother was totally bereft.
Green (natural) & Super-Green (supernatural) Remedies for Suffering and Grief
God's natural & supernatural gifts to the bereaved and suffering.
God has provided so many gifts for us to help us as we navigate this journey through grief and suffering. Some of them occur naturally (green) and some of them are given to us supernaturally (super-green). I do believe that the super-green gifts are the most important. They enable the green gifts to work more effectively. The green gifts alone might not be sufficient to provide the healing and peace that we need.
Divine Mercy After Suicide
Grief Attacks
My Son's Funeral
10 months & 19 days since you passed into eternal life on October 15, 2015.
I have learned that it is God's desire to gather together all of the suffering from grieving hearts and use it as a force for good. Here is a way that God has taught me to allow Him to use these "Grief Attacks" for a higher purpose and to make our loved one who has passed away happy that something good can come from our suffering.
My Heart as a Sanctuary Lamp through Redemptive Suffering
The Gift of Tears?
We are created by God with the ability and urge to cry when our emotions move us, so shedding tears must be an important part of being a human being.
Taking Up Our Cross
Luke 9:23-25 ‘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?
Pope Saint John Paul II and the Cross
After concelebrating Mass with the Holy Father in his private chapel, a priest from Michigan had a brief opportunity to meet the Pope. The priest had a broken leg and stood on crutches as John Paul approached him in the receiving line of guests. He said to the Pope with a twinge of humor and self-pity, “I broke my leg. Can I please have your blessing?” John Paul replied, “Don’t waste your suffering.” The Holy Father raised his hand, blessed the priest, and then with an open palm, thumped the priest on the head (From St John Paul the Great: His Five Loves – by Jason Evert).
What Does It Mean to "Offer It Up?"
Teresa of Avila, in her book The Way of Perfection writes:
"Everything I have advised you about… is directed toward the complete gift of ourselves to the Creator, the surrender of our wills to His, and detachment from creatures…For we are preparing ourselves that we may quickly reach the end of our journey and drink the living water from the fount."
Through Him, With Him, In Him
We are Living Lamps
