Ave Maria Mediations
“I slipped His fingers, I escaped His feet, I ran and hid, for Him I feared to meet.
One day I passed Him, fettered on a Tree, He turned His Head, and looked, and beckoned me.
Neither by speed, nor strength could He prevail. Each hand and foot was pinioned by a nail.
He could not run or clasp me if He tried, But with His eye, He bade me reach His side.
For pity’s sake, thought I, I’ll set you free. ‘Nay — hold this cross,’ He said, ‘and follow me. This yoke is easy, this burden light, Not hard or grievous if you wear it tight.’
So did I follow Him Who could not move, An uncaught captive in the hands of Love.”
— Elizabeth Cheney
And a meditation from Venerable Fulton J. Sheen:
We are at the end of a tradition and a civilization which believed we could preserve Christianity without Christ, religion without a creed, meditation without sacrifice, family life without moral responsibility, sex without purity, and economics without ethics. We have completed our experiment of living without God and have proven the fallacy of a system of education which calls itself progressive because it finds new excuses for sins.
Our so-called progressiveness, did we but realize it, is like unto the progressive putrefaction of a corpse. The soul is gone, and what we call change is only decay. How stop it except by reversing the process by which we drove God out of the world, namely by relighting the lamp of faith in the souls of men?…… [We must not] abandon creeds, and water down the milk of religion to a point where it would no longer nourish. The Catholic Church for one would never do that, because since its truths are God-made they cannot be man-unmade. We are trustees not creators of faith…[T]o all, may there come the full-visioned understanding of how souls are won to truth by the Cross.
