Happy feast day of Saint Joseph

St Joseph with the Child Jesus, by Murillo

+JMJ+ A blessed feast day of Saint Joseph to you! And happy first day of Spring. Here we in the fourth week of Lent. Hasn’t this Lent flown by? My sister sent me a gift card for Christmas and I’m just now using it. What did I get? One book, so far: The Silent Knight: A History of St. Joseph as Depicted in Art, by my favorite art historian and one of my all-time favorite speakers, period, Dr. Elizabeth Lev. I only bought the book today and I haven’t begun to read it yet, so how can I recommend it to you? Well, first, did I mention it’s by Liz Lev? And I’ve watched some interesting interviews about it (see below), so I am looking forward to digging into it. In keeping with the art of Saint Joseph theme I’m going to include a few of my favorite paintings of him. 

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We are not our own best advisers

+JMJ+ I’ve mentioned before that my favorite daily meditations, after the Mass readings and the breviary, come from the series In Conversations with God by Francis Fernandez Carvajal. I was reading in it tonight and this passage jumped out at me.

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Book of the Month, June 2022, Part 22, End

+JMJ+ Welcome to the last part of our current Catholic Book of the Month. I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre, as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together! Now on to the book. We’ll be taking a quick look at its last two sections.

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Book of the Month, May 2022, Part 21

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 21 of our current Catholic Book of the Month, Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre. I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using this book as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together!

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Book of the Month, May 2022, Part 20

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 20 of our current Catholic Book of the Month (okay, season). I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre, as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together! Tonight we’re going to learn about, as Dr. Pitre says, the second key to making progress in our spiritual life: the regular (ack! That’s the part I have problems with!) practice of meditation on Scripture. Do I ever need this! 

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Book of the Month, May 2022, Part 19

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 19 of our current Catholic Book of the Month, Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre. I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using the Introduction as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together. Let’s go, time to make some progress!

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Book of the Month, May 2022, Part 18

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 18 of our current Catholic Book of the Month, Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre. I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using Dr. Pitre’s book as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together! In this post we’ll look at sorrow, the eighth (yes, eighth) capital sin, and its remedy: patience. (I’m having a rough time of it with my physical health right now so I’m looking forward to this section, too, which is probably also going to be briefer than some of the others.)

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Book of the Month, April 2022, Part 17

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 17 of our current Catholic Book of the Month, Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre. I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using this book as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together! In this post we’ll be looking at the capital sin of sloth and its remedy, diligence.

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Book of the Month, April 2022, Part 16

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 16 of our current Catholic Book of the Month, Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre. I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using this book as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together! In this section we’ll look at the sixth capital sin, gluttony, and discover its remedy, temperance.

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Book of the Month, April 2022, Part 15

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 15 of our current Catholic Book of the Month (month, months, whatever), Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre. I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using this book as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together! In part 15 we’ll look at lust, the disordered desire for sexual pleasure, and its remedy, chastity, to be chaste, to have a clean and pure heart, to be set apart for holiness. One who is not chaste is not going to be holy, not until one turns away from the sin of lust and toward the Lord by striving to be chaste. 

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Book of the Month, Mar 2022, Part 14

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 14 of our current Catholic Book of the Month, Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre. During this Lent I’m on a Quest to become a saint, using this book as my guide. Come along with me and let’s become saints together! In this post we’ll look at the cardinal sin of avarice or greed–not mere desire but the disordered and irrational desire to possess or for possessions, one of the “most spiritually dangerous of all the vices” because of the way it “affects the human heart”–and we’ll discover its remedy, generosity.

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Book of the Month, Mar 2022, Part 13

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 13 of our current Catholic Book of the Month (month, season, whatever), Introduction to the Spiritual Life, by Brant Pitre. I’m on a Quest to become a saint and I’m using this book as my guide.  Come along with me and let’s become saints together! In this post we’ll look at the third capital sin, anger, and its remedy. Not all anger, mind you, only the sinful kind. Anger can be righteous, aimed at preserving or obtaining justice, whereas sinful anger desires to harm someone for vengeance and flows from pride. It also flows from impatience. I think we can see this all around us, especially online these days. But there is an antidote as we will soon see. What follows is based on chapter 13 of the Intro.

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