Be Holy, Be Happy!

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #330

Surely Christ repeated the Shemà uninterruptedly to His Father, praying that prayer of holiness throughout each day. It is a prayer of holiness because loving the Lord with all our heart, soul, spirit, and strength means longing for holiness, and anyone who does so is really a saint. . . The prayer of Christ makes us confront our own prayer—how much time do we give to it; what type is it; and what is its intensity? (Holiness)
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Monday, September 29, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #329

Jesus never worked miracles for Himself, (refusing to change stones into bread, for example, despite the apocrypha’s assertion), but for others, yes; He gives Himself completely, unconditionally. Thus we are called to give ourselves completely and unconditionally, too. We are called to be people of the “yes,” without reservation and without personal times of “untouchability.” (Holiness)


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Sunday, September 28, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #345

At the moment God calls me, He justifies me; at the moment of my Baptism, He inscribes my spiritual genetic code within me. Therefore the plan of conformation to Christ is a personal plan, not something that is acquired by chance, but that each one brings already written in the soul from the moment of Baptism when God puts in my soul what my abilities and capabilities for tomorrow will be. (Holiness)
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Journeying with the Founder Day #338

The harmony of faith produces love that understands, forgives, and knows how to help. (Holiness)
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Journeying with the Founder Day #328

We have to learn every virtue from Christ but, most especially, His unconditional self-giving. Jesus gave Himself up to the end; He gave all. He keeps nothing back, nothing for Himself, even letting His time be consumed by His speaking. His time! Jesus has no time for Himself, so we could say that He is a man without time and without space. (Holiness)
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Saturday, September 27, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #327

When we want to verify ourselves, it is sufficient to look to the Gospels to see the life of Christ and to ask ourselves: do my humility, charity, and generosity live up to that of Jesus? We look to Christ’s humble, poor, and self-giving life in order to understand how we should be. (Holiness)
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Friday, September 26, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #326

Christ is holy because He is the incarnate Word of God. Without a doubt we owe to the man Jesus our unconditional love, loving not only with our wills but with our emotions. We must remember that He is not simply a man but also God. He is God Who is incarnate; God Who takes a human form. Thus in Jesus there are two natures [human and divine] but only one Person, the divine Word. Jesus, therefore, is holy because He is the Incarnate Word of God and because He was conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit. He has these two aspects, and both are essential even though the original aspect [His divinity] brings us into the realm of infinity and of absolute transcendence. (Holiness)


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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #325

Holiness is not something that is bestowed externally, that is, simply by a word from God, nor is it something that comes from our own internal efforts. Holiness is a reality that is born through the work of the Holy Spirit. Thus we must give the Holy Spirit space throughout our spiritual life because it is He alone Who forms holiness in us, or more precisely, Who forms in us the face of Christ. (Holiness)


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Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #353

God calls me moment by moment. Every new day—each moment, in fact—is a new birth of the relationship between me and God Who calls me. (Holiness)
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Journeying with the Founder Day #324

As sanctifying grace is the beginning of holiness, which is precisely grace developed to the maximum, so Christian brotherhood is the beginning of that spiritual fraternity which is brotherhood developed to the maximum. As we can and must speak about holiness, so we can and must speak of spiritual brotherhood. (The Revolution of the Samaritans
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Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #323

Christ lived love, He paid for His doctrine of love with His death, and as a testament, He left us the great principle of social love: by this they will know that you are my disciples (John 13:35). This love can and must be social, but on the condition that it must also be Christological in nature and orientation (Love one another as I have loved you: John 13:34), and Trinitarian (I in them and You in Me: John 17:23). (The Revolution of the Samaritans) 


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Monday, September 22, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #322

We, too, are pilgrims journeying toward eternity, toward the Father who has given us the triple, universal vocation: to be saved, to be part of the Church, and to be holy. We are brothers and sisters not only because we came from the Father, but also because all of us must return to His love. And it is on such a communal return to Him that a broader and almost boundless relationship of the fraternal tie of “pietas” is based. We must treat each other, help each other, love each other as brothers and sisters who together strive to reach the love of the Father. If this must be the interior standard of spiritual life, why should it not be also for social life? (The Revolution of the Samaritans
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Sunday, September 21, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #321

We are brothers because we are sons of the same God whom we invoke “Our Father,” we are redeemed by the great Brother, Jesus Christ, and we are all called, personally and collectively, to give a response of total love to the Father and to Christ. Our brotherhood does not stand only on the physical blood-relationship that flows from the first man …but also on the uniqueness of the grace of Christ that unites us with a divine spiritual blood. (The Revolution of the Samaritans
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Saturday, September 20, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #320

It is evident that we must not only reach the simple “animation” of the world but instead push ourselves toward the “sacralization” of social realities. (The Revolution of the Samaritans
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Friday, September 19, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #319

There are profound ties between evangelization and human advancement; however, it would be wrong to reduce the freedom promoted by the Church to purely temporal dimensions. The liberation proclaimed by evangelization must aim at the whole man, and it cannot substitute the announcement of the kingdom for the proclamation of human freedom. It is important and urgent to build more humane structures, but all this would serve little if there is not conversion of heart. Moreover, the Church cannot accept a liberation that comes from violence. (The Revolution of the Samaritans)  
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Thursday, September 18, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #347

We need to see what virtues God wants from us on a natural level and on a revealed level. We find them in God in the Old Testament – patience, forbearance, forgiveness, mercy, the sense of paternity or fatherhood, etc. – and in Christ – meekness, sweetness, "Learn from Me because I am meek and humble of heart" (Mt 11:29), the sense of paternity and maternity, poverty (in the cave and on the Cross), friendship, compassion, the ability to suffer with others, love for the little ones and the sick, unconditional self-giving, the spirit of sacrifice. (Holiness) 
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Journeying with the Founder Day #318

The Word chose to be born poor and in a modest social situation, but not in order to confer spiritual privilege upon a social class nor to teach an unnatural pauperism. He preferred such a life to help us overcome selfishness, ambition, a yearning greed for riches, and pride, and to present to humanity the Ideal Man, who with his fraternal love and his altruism, is able to create a different and better world, a world of brothers and friends. (The Revolution of the Samaritans



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Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #317

Man—and this is the bottom line of the Magnificat—has to enter into a state of humility, that is, of knowledge of God-All, and experience his own nothingness. At the moment in which man enters into this experience of nothingness, he exalts the experience of the God-All, and God can act tranquilly in his soul, without the danger that man might become proud and attribute to himself the effect of God’s work. Thus God is exalted when He has "free rein" with man because it is through man’s nothingness that He can act completely freely, performing great things. (The New Man)
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Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #316

Above all let us be focused on forming around us (here is our specific point) well-leavened   dough, new dough capable of becoming leaven. Let us leaven people. Let us leaven people so that they may become leavened dough; this must be our job, I would say our ambition. And to do this we must have the courage of the truth, the entire truth that we cannot and must not sugarcoat to make it sweeter or more palatable. (The New Man)
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Monday, September 15, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #315

The mother of God—Christ’s Mother—stood at the foot of the Cross waiting for the death that would free humanity and, therefore, each one of us. In that moment the Madonna becomes “the woman who wails aloud in pain as she labored to give birth” (Revelation 12:2). It is in suffering that Mary generates us under the Cross; it is there that her Motherhood of co-redemption is fulfilled.


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Sunday, September 14, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #314

From the height of the Cross, Jesus let resonate for His own and for the entire world His “I thirst,” which did not express His need for water but His passion for souls. For souls He suffered along the way of Calvary, bearing afterwards the agonizing torment of the crucifixion. For souls He would give His life; to them He addresses a heartfelt plea to not forget His gift of love, His immense, infinite Self-giving love without measure. Christ, who could have redeemed us with only a drop of His adorable blood, gives all, even unto the shame of death on a Cross, because He longs for us to love Him in return. It is the fire of love that burns in His soul and that He wants burning in our hearts. (Racemi)


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Saturday, September 13, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #313

We must say that Christ, the New Man, really presented Himself among us; He lived with us in our midst as an agonizing man, as a man who fights. And consequently the life of the Church, of the society of new men, cannot but be marked by this agony, in the past, today, and tomorrow. (The New Man)
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Friday, September 12, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #312

Christ comes, but He comes as an agonizing Christ who must fight. And precisely this will show us what must be characteristic of the new man: an agonizing man, a man of combat, a man who does not have an easy road, a comfortable journey. We find the agony of Christ expressed, even before Gethsemane, along His whole journey. (The New Man)
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Thursday, September 11, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #311

It is certain that the action of the invisible Holy Spirit is real and continuous. As Christ is encircled by this light and by this constant, luminous cloud—the Holy Spirit present in the life and the soul of Christ—so also are we. As long as we are in a state of grace, this reality of the indwelling of the Spirit, that then bursts forth in our life and our activities, is constant. As long as we are in a state of grace, the Holy Spirit never departs from us, and He forms the new man in us. (The New Man)


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Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #310

The chosen people of the Old Testament are born by an initial act of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit Who acts in the Patriarchs (who are the forefathers of the chosen people) and Who then globally assists the chosen people while not generating the members of the chosen people, because they are born by natural birth. In the new Church the Holy Spirit is not only present in the chosen people in the Church, but He Himself generates the new members of the chosen people: we are—maybe this is a somewhat strong expression, but try to understand it—we are the work of the Holy Spirit, we are generated by the Holy Spirit, we are children of the Holy Spirit. (The New Man)
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Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #309

Jesus does not give any explanation, He speaks only of the mysterious presence of the Spirit—we know neither where He comes from nor where He leads. We only know that He is a mysterious presence. He is like the wind that you can hear without knowing where it comes from or where it leads; because the Holy Spirit takes possession of our souls and our only duty is to close our eyes in faith and allow the Holy Spirit to lead us, I would say that we must carry out this great act of faith in the Holy Spirit in the decisive moments of choice. (The New Man)
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Monday, September 8, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #308

What can we ask from Mary? Everything, because we are in need of many things and she, who is our Mother, understands us. Above all we are to ask of her one thing: that she gives us the grace to enter into the mysterious world of love, which we can only sense through experience. Let us ask the Madonna, for ourselves and for the others, for those who are close and those who are far, that we may enter into this mysterious world of love: the world of Jesus, the world of Spirit, the world of the Eucharist. (Marvelous Things Are Said of You.)


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Sunday, September 7, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #307

Regarding the Church, I ask you to love much, to pray even more, and to refrain from judging. Why? Because none of us can know what the Holy Spirit is achieving. (The New Man)
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Saturday, September 6, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #306

The Church is born from the Holy Spirit; the Church is redeemed in a certain way by the blood of Christ. According to the interpretation of the Fathers of the Church, from the Heart of Christ, pierced by a lance, the foundational sacraments of the Church are born, that is, the water of Baptism and the blood of the Eucharist. (The New Man)
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Friday, September 5, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #305

How has this mystery of the conception of the eternal, uncreated Word of God in the womb of Our Lady taken place? How did she become Mother? What was the constant assistance of the Spirit throughout the whole period in which the Madonna carried in her womb the eternal Word of God? All this is not ours to know; before this mystery let us be content to kneel down and to adore, without pretending to go beyond because they are the most sacred, highest, and most delicate mysteries we find in our faith. And let us not be ashamed to say that we do not understand the mystery, because if we knew the mystery, it would not be a mystery. We only know that Christ was born of the Blessed Mother by the work of the Holy Spirit. (The New Man)
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Thursday, September 4, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #304

The Church is a new reality on pilgrimage that can intone the psalm of Exodus; it is a Church that in some way suffers, it is a Church that yearns toward, it is a Church in procession toward the final goal, toward the eschaton, that will be reached only after time; it is a Church that is journeying toward the Omega point that is Christ. (The New Man)


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Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #303

The Servant of Yahweh, in washing the feet of the Apostles, bent over to teach us service. Service is newness and is characteristic of the Church and of the new man. (The New Man)
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Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #302

We are born, we grow, and we work as new men in the Church through the sacraments. The sacraments on one side build a new man in us; on the other side they make us builders of new men. Therefore we are faced with a double examination: how much have we let ourselves be built as new men through the sacraments, and how much have we ourselves, through the sacraments, been builders of new men, sowing newness around us? (The New Man)
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Monday, September 1, 2014

Journeying with the Founder Day #301

The Church is the continuation of Christ; she is the fullness of Christ. Christ is historically present through the Church and therefore the Church continues Christ, the New Man; the Church is the continuation of Christ in history, in time, and in space. (The New Man)
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