crisis pregnancy counselor, writer, adult faith formation catechist, volunteer at school, substitute teacher, pursuing a Master's degree in Theology and loving all I'm learning!

traveling, camping, reading, history, apologetics,scrapbooking

classic rock, some classical, country and Christian, Gregorian chant

Lord of the Rings trilogy, Gone With the Wind, Breaker Morant, Passion of the Christ, Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock in general), Life is Beautiful, It's a Wonderful Life, Best Years of Our Lives, Chariots of Fire, Yours Mine and Ours (original), Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Shawshank Redemption, Quiet Man, African Queen, Sound of Music, Patton, The Great Escape

"The Lord" by Romano Guardini, "The Life of Christ" by Fulton Sheen, "Story of a Soul" by St. Therese of Lisieux, "Orthodoxy" and "What's Wrong with the World" by G.K. Chesterton, "Trojan Horse in the City of God" by Dietrich von Hildebrand, "Father Elijah" by Michael O'Brien, Lord of the Rings trilogy, "Berlin Diary" and "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer, "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen, "A Town Like Alice" by Nevil Shute "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell,

"Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible to himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it." John Paul the Great, Redemptor Hominis (Redeemer of Man)

"There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God's darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast." Pope Benedict XVI

"When Jesus talks about fire, he means in the first place his own Passion. Jesus sets fire to the earth. Whoever comes close to Jesus, accordingly, must be prepared to be burned. Being a Christian, then, is daring to entrust oneself to this burning fire. This is what Saint Paul means when he says that we are to present ourselves 'as slaves to righteousness for sanctification." Pope Benedict XVI

"Place on thy heart one drop of the Precious Blood of Jesus and fear nothing." Pope Pius IX

"Who except God can give you peace? Has the world ever been able to satisfy the heart?" St. Gerard Majella

"It is because I am weak that I dare to receive God, who is strong." St. Bernadette

"The task set before the Baptist as he lay in prison was to become blessed by this unquestioning acceptance of God's obscure will; to reach the point of asking no further for external, visible, unequivocal clarity, but, instead, of discovering God precisely in the darkness of this world and of his own life, and thus becoming profoundly blessed. John even in his prison cell had to respond once again and new to his own call for metanoia, or a change of mentality, in order that he might recognize his God in the night in which all things earthly exist. Only when we act in this manner does another-- and doubtless the greatest--saying of the Baptist reveal its full significance: 'He must increase; but I must decrease' (Jn 3:30). We will know God to the extent that we are set free from ourselves." Pope Benedict XVI


"Oh, if only the suffering soul knew how much God loves it, it would die of joy and excess of happiness! Some day, we will know the value of suffering, but then we will no longer be able to suffer. The present moment is ours." St. Faustina Kowalska

"For Jesus is our Hope: through His merciful Heart as through an open gate we pass through to heaven." St. Faustina

"Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." Blaise Pascal

"When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to Him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing and acting, according to their judgment or their humor, without any thought of God at all. . .Conscience has rights because it has duties: but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations. . .Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had. It is the right of self-will." Cardinal John Henry Newman (written in the 19th century and still true today!)

"Who is the hireling who, seeing the approach of the wolf, takes flight? He who seeks himself and does not seek what is of Jesus Christ: he who does not dare to frankly admonish the sinner. . .Now [the hireling], the one who seeks himself and not what is of Jesus Christ will be silent and not give any admonition, in order not to lose what he seeks, namely, the advantages of personal friendship, and in order to avoid the unpleasantness (the worry) or personal enmity. The wolf at that moment takes hold of the sheep to throttle them. . .You are silent, O hireling, and do not admonish. . .Your silence was your flight. You are silent; you were afraid. Fear is the flight of the soul." St. Augustine

"Interficere errorem, diligere errantem (kill the error, love the one who errs)" St. Augustine

"Any change whatever except from what is evil is the most dangerous of all things." Plato

"Five thousand years of history show that, hard as it is to lead men to truth, few things are easier than to lead men into error." Warren H. Carroll

"What God's Son has told me, take for truth I do; Truth himself speaks truly or there's nothing true." St. Thomas Aquinas

"But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried." G.K. Chesterton

"And Mr. [George Bernard] Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. . .Suffice it to say here that when I say that we should instruct our children, I mean that we should do it, not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes should do it. The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit." G.K. Chesteron (in 1910)

"The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere offense at the grotesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in a cage in the Regent's Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and many other grotesque things; they do not much mind making beasts of themselves, and would not much mind having beasts made of their forefathers. The real instinct was much deeper and much more valuable. It was this: that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes." G. K. Chesterton

"Man thinks of God as a stern and lofty challenge, as the relentless Holy One. But he is nearer to us than ever a lover was to his dearest one; he bears in his heart our deepest concerns and bestows on us his ever watchful care. He is devoted to us with the ceaselessly creative trust in the beloved: 'You are! You can! And I will give you everything so that you may become what I have implanted in you.' Man thinks of God as remote and unreal, and this is the worst of all his misconceptions. Power and awfulness are great things. But it is terrifying to think of God as a pure abstraction, dissolving into nothingness, houses and trees and people and events, become so real that they oppress us and yet he becomes a mere theory, a concept, an insubstantial sound, or a vague atmosphere. Nevertheless, God is real! God is the Comforter. What is the meaning of comfort? How does it come about? Certainly not by reasoning and reckoning. Advice and argument are no comfort: they leave us cold. They leave man alone in his need and suffering. Nothing comes to him by them. But comfort is full of life; it has an immediacy and an intimacy that makes all things new. To comfort, you must love. You must be open and enter into another's heart. You must be observant; you must have the free and sensitive heart that finds the paths of life with quiet assurance; you must be able to discover the sore and withered places. You must have the subtletly and strength to penetrate to the living center, to the deep source of life that has dried up. The heart must combine with this source of life, must summon it to life again so that it can flow through all the deserts and ruins within." Monsignor Romano Guardini

"When Jesus said: 'Repent and believe in the Gospel,' he was already teaching justification through faith. Before Jesus, conversion always mean 'going back,' as the term used in Hebrew, shub, for the same action indicates. It signified going back to the broken covenant through a renewed observance of the law. . .Only on the lips of Jesus could the word repentance take on a new meaning addressed more to the future than to the past; only with him, in fact, did a shift occur in the center of gravity of history, so that the most important thing lies no longer in the past but ahead of man. To be converted does not, therefore, mean to go back to the old covenant and the observance of the law; it means to take a step forward and enter the new covenant, to accept this kingdom that has appeared and entered into it by faith. . .Faith. . .is the first fundamental conversion. Through it we enter into the kingdom. . .You are being told: the door is faith. Believe! This is not something above or beyond you, it is not so far removed from you. . . The Council of Trent stated that 'such was God's mercy towards man as to consider merits of ours what in fact, are gifts of his." . . .God casts all our sins behind his back and keeps, instead, all our good actions in front of him, including that of a glass of water given to the poor (see Tb 12:12; Acts 10:4). Let us cast all our good actions behind our backs and keep our sins in front of us. The more we keep our sins in front of us, the more God casts them behind him; the more we cast our good works behind us the more God keeps them in front of him." Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM

"Modern rationalism does not tolerate mystery. It does not accept the mystery of man as male and female, nor is it willing to admit that the full truth about man has been revealed in Jesus Christ. In particular, it does not accept the "great mystery" proclaimed in the Letter to the Ephesians but radically opposes it. It may well acknowledge, in the context of a vague deism, the possibility or even the need for a supreme or divine Being. But it firmly rejects the idea of a God who became man in order to save man. For rationalism, it is unthinkable that God should be the Redeemer, much less that he should be "the bridegroom," the primordial and unique source of the human love between spouses. Rationalism provides a radically different way of looking at creation and the meaning of human existence. But once man begins to lose sight of a God who loves him, a God who calls man through Christ to live in him and with him, and once the family is no longer has the possibility of sharing in the "great mystery," what is left except the mere temporal dimension of life? Earthly life becomes nothing more than the scenario of a battle for existence, a desperate search for gain, and financial gain before all else." John Paul the Great, Letter to Families

"The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning, great is
Thy faithfulness." Lamentations 3:22-23

"Lord, I love the house where you dwell, the place where your glory abides." Psalm 26:8

"For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in Him but also suffer for His sake, engaged in the same conflict which you saw and now hear to be mine." Philippians 1:29-30

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." John 10:10

"Come in, let us bow and bend low; let us kneel before the God who made us for He is our God and we the people who belong to His pasture, the flock that is led by His hand." Psalm 95

"I know well I have in mind for you, says the Lord, for your welfare, not for woe! Plans to give you a future full of hope." Jeremiah 29:11

"Prayer expands our small hearts and renders them capable of loving God." St. John Vianney

"He who is his own master is a scholar under a fool." St. Bernard

"What does love look like? It has feet to go to the poor and needy; eyes to see misery and want; ears to hear sighs and sorrows." St. Augustine

"Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty, ever-ancient ever-new." St. Augustine

"There is no night in Mary, because there is no sin, nor even the slightest shade. Mary is a holy place, and the holy of holies where saints are formed and molded." St. Louis de Montfort

"This light of faith comes directly from God and shapes our supernatural existence. It gives our actions, which appear to resemble those of other people, an end that the actions of others do not have, and it gives an incomparable value to ourselves and to our souls. Our bodily and rational lives differ in no way from those of the other members of the human race, but there is something 'beyond,' not, as all too many people imagine, antagonistic to this life. There is a higher life, which permeates our entire selves, transforming them, giving them motives for action, supernatural like itself, and fashioning our outer lives into the likeness of our innermost being, so as to create an harmonious unity. This supernatural light never overshadows the human mind and its learning. Rather, shedding its rays upon them, it illumines them fore intensely, and it is superior and exterior to them, as it were. Shining on humble as well as powerful minds, it reaches the soul within and gives it a motive for living and acting, the meaning of suffering, an explanation of death, as well as revealing to it the beauty and usefulness of our activity in this wolrd and its supernatural fruitfulness. . .This is the life of faith, understood not as passive acquiescence on the part of the mind, but as an active acceptance, a lively assimilation of truths that surpass the mind and which constant experience, suggested and directed by grace, impresses upon us. You will possess this life, and it is now going to begin in you." Elisabeth Leseur

"God and his Christ make use of Mary in this sense, that they make all the graces which they destine for us pass through her. . .By using her as intermediary, they temper their action all the more with humanity, without in any way diminishing its divine efficacy. They make Mary live by the life we are to live by. She is first filled to overflowing with it. Grace is preformed in her and receives in her the imprint of special beauty. All grace and all graces come to us thus canalized and distributed by her, impregnated with that special sweetness which she imparts to all she touches and all she does. By her action Mary enters therefore into our lives as bearer of the divine. In the whole course of our lives, from the cradle and before it to the grave and beyond it, there is nothing of grace in which she had no part. She shapes us into the likeness of Jesus. . .She leaves her mark on everything and adds to the perfection of what passes through her hands. I have said that we are sustained by her prayer: we are similarly sustained by her action and, if one may say it, have our spiritual being in her hands. Every Christian is a child of Mary, but a child is not worthy of the name unless it is formed by its mother." Fr. Pierre Rogatien Bernard, OP

"Abide in the home of the divine and fatherly goodness of God like his child who knows nothing, does nothing, makes a mess of everything, but nevertheless lives in His goodness." St. Peter Julian Eymard

"God does everything, disposes everything, foresees everything with the purpose of leading you to himself." St. Peter Julian Eymard

"Nihil amori Christi praeponere (prefer nothing to the love of Christ)" St. Benedict

"Our Lord our God, You have replanted on our earth the garden lost in Eden, and you have sent a new Gardener to till the soil ploughed by the wood of the cross. He who is both the farmer and the seed has watered the earth with his life's blood shed for our redemption. Make us grow in his likeness by the power of his word dwelling in our hearts. Through the same Christ our Lord, Amen."
prayer from the Liturgy of Hours

"O Jesus, sure joy of my soul, give me but a true love of you. Let me seek you as my only good." St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

"I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world." Blessed Mother Teresa

"Niepokalanow is a home like Nazareth. The Father is God the Father, the mother and mistress of the home is the Immaculata, the firstborn son and our brother is Jesus in the most Holy Sacrament of the altar. All the younger brothers try to imitate the elder Brother in love and honor towards God and the Immaculata, our common parents, and from the Immaculata they try to love the divine elder Brother, the ideal of sanctity who deigned to come down from heaven to be incarnated in her and to live with us in the tabernacle... " St. Maximilian Kolbe