A Life of the Cross

“The life of any prophet takes an interesting turn when he or she learns to depend on God's grace much more than on personal strength”

“So there you are, everybody, read this section chapter 20 of Jeremiah and it's like all the, all the texture of being a prophet is on display, all the emotion and experience of being a prophet. Profit from his experience and become yourself a great prophet.”

“Once we've heard the word of God, we cannot unhear it. Right? Once you've heard it, you can't unhear it. You can't unring the bell. You can't pretend that you don't know it.”

“think of the moral life liturgically. Liturgically it's an offering of yourself to God and you want that offering to be as pure and perfect as possible.”

“we are called to help lighten the burdens of others, as Jesus constantly does for us. To me, being Christ to others is the essence of missionary life. It is the life that we are called to as baptized Christians.”

“To pick up a cross and follow Jesus may well mean that we feel so acutely the children who are chronically hungry that we respond with both immediate generosity and a long-term commitment to understand and transform systemic roots of the famine”

“Nothing stands in the way of our ultimate salvation as much as our own ‘cosy’ Christianity, the sort that wants to be a follower of Christ on our own terms”

“Throughout our Christian lives, we continually fall short of our commitment to our faith. Yet we must never lose sight of the truth we ought to understand from the start: we are surrendering our lives to Christ.”

“Finding salvation is not a matter of winning points. Accepting God’s initiative, opting for God, means opting for what our society labels failure. This, of course, sounds depressing, but is it so really?”

“A focus on technological solutions...often seems like a good idea to maintain our current standard of lifestyle but like Peter's efforts in the Gospel, might it also give us a temporary sense of control over global challenges that need a deeper more transformative and local solution?”

“Worldly success or worldly failure. Popularity, unpopularity. Honor, dishonor. Rightly ordered, the soul can handle all of those situations”

“What is your final frame of reference? Is it 'how do I avoid pain' or 'how do I love'? See, how you answer that or how you determine that will shape everything else in your life.”

“Path of discipleship is the path of self-sacrificing love and that means, again in the high paradox, it will be a path of suffering, yes, but it's the only way past suffering to real life”

“Why does he rebuke Peter? Well, because he doesn't get the cross. Christians, it's always the same story. It's always the same story in the Gospel. Those who don't get the cross don't get him.”

“That is the hard lesson of discipleship: that our deepest longings will be met—though not in the way we imagine them—by a God of love and mercy, who leads by example, with the gentleness of a lamb, with the embrace of a cross, and with infinite proclivity for surprise”

“We are not promised that the way of love will be painless, but we are promised that it will be worth it”

“I offer that “losing one’s self” is concerned with eradicating the negative tales we believe about ourselves or that have been put upon us – e.g. not good enough, not smart enough, etc.— so that we can “save” our lives. This means growing into the likeness of God in whose image we have been created.”

“When Christ was crucified, evil assaulted him with all its power. He did not fight back using the strategies of earthly power. He remained God, remained true to his nature of love, endured the evil, and overcame it. Because Jesus did that, we can, too”

“With infinite patience and creativity, God keeps on knocking at the door of our lives, sometimes with utter discretion and at other times with insistence, until we open and embark on the road to freedom and joy. God does not give up on us”

“Today’s readings remind us that once we have decided to say yes to the Lord, then we should prepare to have it tough because it will never be easy. Yet it is in living the tough experience of faith that our true identity as disciples is defined.”

“We are not necessarily ministerial priests whose vocation is specifically to preside at the liturgy. Nonetheless, we are true priests, and our sacrifice, like Jesus’, is our very lives, our very selves (our “bodies” in St. Paul’s terminology)”

“We cannot dissuade Christ from being the vulnerable Messiah, as Peter once tried to, and we cannot cover our ears from the voice that burns within our own hearts commanding us to take up our Cross as we go out to the whole world to proclaim the Good News”

“I do know that our crosses in life, can purify us, shape our soul, our character, and our strength – if we trust in and rely on God to get us through, even if we don’t understand”

“We, the beloved, may try to hide from our divine lover, but he will always be there. We may refuse to take up our cross, only to find him carrying it for us.”

“Our faith and prayer is that we are also chosen by God to bear witness to Christ in our place and in our time”

“We, like Peter, all have our failings. We fail to understand God’s purpose as we ought, and we can fail in bearing witness to him...let us pray also for God’s grace for ourselves, so that we may persevere in our faith, and in making that faith known to those we meet.”

“We cannot postpone living until the cross is gone. That is why we are asked to take up the cross on our shoulders and follow Jesus.”