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The Sixth Friday of Great Lent: Gluttony is the Snare of the Devil & Ridiculous Conceit

04/22/2016

Gluttony is the Snare of the Devil The devil said to Jesus: ‘If you are the son of God, command that these stones become bread.’ [Luke 4:3] Here we learn that there are three principal weapons that the devil likes to carry in order to wound our souls. They are gluttony, arrogance and ambition. He begins with the weapon with which he has already been victorious. We likewise should begin to be victorious in Christ

The Sixth Thursday of Great Lent: Greed is never Satisfied & Anyone Given to Lust is Dead while Alive

04/21/2016

Greed is never Satisfied Ambrose said: ‘Avarice and pride are so much the same evil that you cannot find someone who is proud but not avaricious nor someone who is avaricious but not proud.’ Isidore said: ‘The greater our love for the things we possess, the greater our pain when we lose them. ‘Greed is insatiable. The person who is afflicted with it always needs something else; the more he has, the more he wants.

The Sixth Wednesday of Great Lent: Three Kinds of Lies & Few Manage to Stem the Gossiping Tongue

04/20/2016

Three Kinds of Lies There are three kinds of liar: those who lie with their thoughts, those who lie with words and those who lie with their very lives. The liar of thought, for example, is the individual who is suspicious. If he sees two people talking, he immediately imagines they are talking about him. If they break off their conversation, he is convinced they are doing so because they have seen him coming. Whatever

The Sixth Tuesday of Great Lent: The Worm of Pride & The New Pharisees

04/19/2016

The Worm of Pride Augustine said: ‘We must avoid pride. If it was able to deceive angels, how much more will it be able to scatter human wits.’ Ambrose said: ‘Pride transformed angels into demons, humility makes human beings into saints. Pride leads you to despise God’s commandments, humility urges you to follow them. The proud want to be praised even for what they have not done, the humble try to hide the good they

The Sixth Monday of Great Lent: Just as Crabs & Idleness Contains All Sin

04/18/2016

Just as Crabs Just as a bundle of green logs suffocates and puts out a bonfire causing clouds of smoke, so excessive grief often surrounds the soul with thick cloud and dries up the fount of tears. Just as a blind person is no use as an archer, so a disciple with the mania of contradiction will end in perdition. Just as tempered metal can sharpen soft or rusty metal, so can a zealous brother

The Fifth Friday of Great Lent: The Three Stages & One Vice leads to Another

04/15/2016

The Three Stages We must distinguish simple thoughts, that is, ones without passion, from passionate thoughts. If we are examining the way in which sins of thought begin, we notice that the latter, namely passionate thoughts are accompanied by a large number of simple thoughts. Let us take money as an example. Someone thinks of a sum of money belonging to someone else. His imagination urges him to theft, and in his spirit he has

The Fifth Thursday of Great Lent: The Faithfulness of the Whore who Married the Governor & Detach Passion from the Image

04/14/2016

The Faithfulness of the Whore who Married the Governor Abbot John the Dwarf said: ‘If a king wanted to capture the town of his enemy, first of all he would cut off its water supply and prevent food from getting in. The enemies, dying of hunger, would surrender. In the same way we should treat the passions of the flesh. If someone lives in fasting and hunger, in a short while the enemies of his

The Fifth Wednesday of Great Lent: The Devil has not Full Power & The Devil’s Strategy

04/13/2016

The Devil has not Full Power Among the angelic powers the chief of the terrestrial order, the one to whom God had entrusted the task of looking after the earth, was not evil by nature, he had not received any trace of evil from his Creator. He was good. However, he did not maintain the light and the honour that God had given him. By a deliberate act of his own free will he rebelled

The Fifth Tuesday of Great Lent: How Weak the Wicked Are! & Sin is a Contagious Disease

04/12/2016

How Weak the Wicked Are! See for a moment how weak the wicked are. They cannot even reach the spot to which instinct is leading and almost pushing them. What would happen if they lacked even this help from nature, so strong as to seem irresistible? Look how impotent they are! They long for objects that are simple and of little account and yet they do not even succeed in attaining these. They indeed lack

The Fifth Monday of Great Lent: Accomplices & Right Use not Misuse

04/11/2016

Accomplices Inside us evil is at work suggesting unworthy inclinations. However, it is not in us in the same way as, to take an example, water mixes with wine. Evil is in us without being mixed with good. We are a field in which wheat and weeds are growing separately. We are a house in which there is a thief, but also the owner. We are a spring which rises from the middle of the

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