I'm BAAAAAAACK

Hi, Josh!

I'm back, and I'm so sorry for my absence! I'm so excited that you will be ordained a deacon a year from today! :)

As my inaugural post for the rest of your journey towards the priesthood, I want to share a quote by Frank Sheed from his book Theology and Sanity. It's basically my favorite thing that I've ever read.

"I can recall with great clarity the moment when for the first time I heard myself say that God had made me and all things of nothing. I had known it, like any other Catholic, from childhood; but I had never properly taken it in. I had said it a thousand times but I had never heard what I was saying. In the sudden realization of this particular truth there is something peculiarly shattering. There are truths of religion immeasurably mightier in themselves, and the realization of any one of them might well make the heart miss a beat. But this one goes to the very essence of what we are, and goes there almost with the effect of annihilation. Indeed it is a kind of annihilation. God used no material in our making; we are made of nothing. At least self-sufficiency is annihilated, and all those customary ways that the illusion of self-sufficiency has made for us. The first effect of realizing that one is made of nothing is a kind of panic-stricken insecurity. One looks round for some more stable thing to clutch, and in this matter none of the beings of our experience are any more stable than we, for at the origin of them all is the same truth; all are made of nothing. But the panic and the insecurity are merely instinctual and transient. A mental habit has been annihilated, but the way toward a sounder mental habit is at least clear.  For although we are made of nothing, we are made into something, and since what we are made of does not account for us, we are forced to a more intense concentration upon the God we are made by."

If you have not read this book, I highly recommend reading it :) And if you ever want to borrow it, let me know!

I'm praying for you!

:)