ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

Peace is not just the absence of war. It involves mutual respect and confidence between peoples and nations. It involves collaboration and binding agreements. Like a cathedral, peace has to be constructed, patiently and with unshakable faith. Wherever the strong exploit the week, wherever the rich take advantage of the poor, wherever great powers seem to dominate and to impose ideologies, there the work of making peace is undone; there the cathedral of peace is again destroyed. Today, the scale and the horror of modern warfare—whether nuclear or not—makes it totally unacceptable as a means of settling differences between nations. War should belong to the tragic past, to history; it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future. ST. POPE JOHN PAUL II Homily at Mass, Coventry, 30 May 1982

We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to our life in God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God's deepening his life in me. ST. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA

You who are accustomed to be present at the divine mysteries know how you receive the Lord's body with every care and reverence, lest the smallest crumb of the consecrated gift should be dropped. You would think, and think rightly, that you were culpable if something fell to the ground through your negligence. If you use, and rightly use, such care about his body, why do you think it less of a crime to be negligent about his word than his body? ORIGEN

For anybody who either seeks what is forbidden or desires to seem to be somebody or other in this world, is inwardly beset with a countless throng of thoughts. While they stir up a host of desires in their heart, their prostrate spirit is ignominiously trodden by the feet of a crowded marketplace. The mind which is disordered by a rebel riot of thoughts suffers, as it were from over-population. ST. GREGORY THE GREAT

Contemplation is nothing other than a loving, simple and permanent attention of the spirit to divine things, as you will easily appreciate by comparing meditation with it. We meditate to gather the love of God, but having gathered it we contemplate God and are attentive to his goodness on account of the sweetness which love makes us find in it. In sum, meditation is the mother of love, but contemplation her daughter: and this is why I called contemplation a loving attention. ST. FRANCIS DE SALES

The philosopher, scientist and artist within us combine to lead us throughout life on a journey of exploration, understanding and celebration of the whole of reality. Creation is a single and continuing expression of God's overwhelming goodness and love, even though there is much to bewilder and baffle, much left unexplained. All discovery and research are, however, an exploration into the mind of God. All knowledge is a sharing in it. But at the end of our journey and striving, when we come into the presence of the living God, every other experience, all other beauty, will seem but straw. Then we shall know as we are known, love as we are loved, and God will be all in all. BASIL HUME A Turning to God