More Than an Idea

"What can one say to the person who says: “I would like to, but I can’t!” Nothing more than to say that one must want to want to! That is the first step. I want to means that I am using all the means thereto, while I’d want to means that I am afraid to use them all for some may cost me too dearly in matters of self-love." If we do not have a desire for holiness, we must pray to desire holiness. If we do not have a desire to even want to desire holiness, then we must let our prayer begin there. "God is at work in you, to will and to work for His good pleasure" (Phil 2:13). The Holy Spirit will work in us in so far as we avail ourselves to these actions and movements of grace... Come Holy Spirit ...  "Such souls still are possessed by a great deal of self-love, egoism and even spiritual self-conceit. Must one want to be a saint? Of course, and firmly." To desire to become a saint is not selfish. In fact, if grounded upon the ...

The Moral of the Story is...  I’m a sorry and sour excuse for an English major. Before coming into college, I would not have described myself as a reader. I admit—much to my chagrin—that in my AP Literature class in high school I couldn’t finish (or was too lazy to finish) T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. More so, I struggled to start and even persevere through William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying —so much so that I gave up on it after the first few sections… I’m sorry Mrs. Healey! (And yes, two years later, after committing to studying English at Duke, I picked up Faulkner’s book to read it in full…) Evidently, prose, drama, and poetry, the very bare bones composition of a degree in literature, have been a stumbling block for me. However, something changed, something clicked, once I began studying literature in college. While studying Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I realized that I had been reading for a moral, a point. What happens? Is Hester, the woman brande...